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LiveScience
LiveScience
Shreejaya Karantha

The James Webb telescope may have discovered a brand new class of cosmic object: the black hole star

An illustration of a black hole star with a cutaway showing the black hole at its center.

Astronomers have discovered a new object that could help shed light on mysterious "little red dots" that were first spotted by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) in 2022.

The newfound object, dubbed "the Cliff," suggests that the little red dots represent a totally new class of cosmic objects known as a "black hole star," the researchers say. This newly hypothesized object would essentially be a black hole feeding so rapidly that it lights up the thick cocoon of gas surrounding it, making it glow like a star.

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