Rohan Naidu was not hunting for black holes when he found one wearing a star’s disguise. The NASA Hubble Fellow at MIT’s Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research was combing James Webb Space Telescope images for the earliest known galaxies when a single red dot, brighter and redder than anything else in the frame, stopped his survey team in its tracks.
That object, cataloged as MoM-BH*-1 and detailed in a paper published in the journal Nature on August 12, 2026, resembles an enormous star spanning roughly the width of the solar system. It also puts out about 100 billion times more energy than any known star could physically generate, a mismatch that pointed the research team toward an entirely new category of cosmic object rather than an unusually bright galaxy.
Rohan Naidu’s survey was hunting galaxies, not black holes
Naidu and his colleagues were running a project they named “Mirage or Miracle,” designed to sort genuinely early galaxies from objects that only looked like them in Webb’s infrared images. Working with observations captured a few hundred million years after the Big Bang, the team kept encountering a feature astronomers call a Balmer break, a sharp drop in light below certain wavelengths normally associated with gas absorbing photons in the outer layers of stars a few hundred million years old. In MoM-BH*-1, that drop was the deepest the team had measured in any object, according to MIT’s account of the discovery, ruling out an ordinary star as the source before the team had settled on what the object actually was.
The light also carried almost no trace of anything besides hydrogen and helium, a chemical signature that further separated the object from a typical dusty, metal-enriched galaxy. Robert Simcoe, director of MIT’s Kavli Institute and the Bruno B. Rossi Professor of Experimental Physics, explained that the team initially suspected interstellar dust was reddening the light the way wildfire smoke can redden a sunset, but the spectral pattern did not match what dust alone would produce.
A 100,000-solar-mass black hole wrapped in a hydrogen cocoon
Simulations run by the team eventually reproduced the object’s extreme color using nothing but an extremely dense screen of hydrogen, dense enough to behave like the surface of a star rather than a diffuse nebula. That still left the brightness problem unsolved, since gas alone cannot generate the energy Webb recorded. Adding an actively accreting black hole into the simulation, and testing different masses against the observed brightness, gave the team a match: a central black hole roughly 100,000 times the mass of the Sun, encased in a dense envelope of hydrogen gas roughly the size of the solar system.
Co-author Wendy Sun, who graduated from MIT in 2026, worked alongside Naidu and Simcoe on the analysis, along with collaborators from several other institutions. The team named the object MoM-BH*-1 after the survey that found it, using a designation that signals it as the first of what they expect to be a broader class rather than a one-off oddity.
A candidate explanation for Webb’s little red dots
Small, extremely red points of light like MoM-BH*-1 have turned up throughout Webb’s deep-field images since the telescope began operating, a population astronomers have informally called “little red dots” without a settled explanation for what they are. Naidu’s team argues that black hole stars, effectively young black holes still cloaked in the gas they are consuming, could account for a large share of that population, even though most of the other red dots observed so far are considerably dimmer than MoM-BH*-1 itself.
In an interview with The Guardian following the paper’s publication, Naidu suggested the phenomenon could shape how supermassive black holes form and grow across cosmic history, potentially influencing when and how the galaxies around them are able to form stars. Naidu went further in comments carried by Mashable, arguing that if black hole stars really do power most of Webb’s little red dots, then the channel that builds massive black holes this way has to be common enough that almost every large black hole seen today, including the one at the center of the Milky Way, may have passed through a similar phase early in its history.
The peer-reviewed paper itself, along with background on the research group behind it at the MIT Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research, lays out the case that MoM-BH*-1 is not a single anomaly but the first confirmed example of black holes hiding in plain sight inside what looked, at first glance, like ordinary early galaxies. Naidu’s group had already spent years chasing similarly disguised objects at cosmic dawn, including an earlier flickering quasar the same team identified only months before MoM-BH*-1 turned up in the same survey data, a track record that helped the researchers recognize how unusual the new object’s light really was.
This article was produced with the assistance of AI and reviewed by Morning Overview editors prior to publication.
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