Nasa<\/a>\u2019s James Webb Space Telescope was launched, scientists have spotted \u201clittle red dots\u201d. They are prevalent throughout space \u2013\u00a0but nobody knows for sure what they are.<\/p>\nNow scientists believe that the most likely explanation for those little red dots is this kind of object: a combination of a black hole and a star. Nobody has ever seen such an object before.<\/p>\n
It could also help explain another cosmic mystery: how so many black holes, with a mass of a billion suns, were able to form so soon after the Big Bang. Researchers have plenty of theories about how black holes could become so massive so quickly, but nobody has ever known the true reason.<\/p>\n
Astronomers think that the object is probably a hugely dense cloud of gas. It is not powered by nuclear fusion, like a normal star, but a black hole at its centre.<\/p>\n
\u201cOur picture of this object is evolving very rapidly,\u201d says lead author Rohan Naidu, a Nasa hubble fellow and Pappalardo fellow at MIT\u2019s Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research. \u201cWe think there is a central black hole that is 100,000 times as massive as the sun.<\/p>\n
And around this black hole, there would be this very extended envelope of gas that looks like a star the size of the solar system. It\u2019s huge.\u201d<\/p>\n
The object found in the study has been called MoM-BH*-1 and is so far away that the light reaching us is from near the beginning of the universe \u2013\u00a013 billion years ago, just 660 million years after the Big Bang. The same study also found the most distant galaxy ever discovered, known as MoM-z14.<\/p>\n
The names of both objects are a nod to the name of the study, \u2018Mirage or Miracle\u2019. It uses the James Webb Space Telescope to study distant galaxies that appear to be remarkably bright, despite being so far away and from so early in the universe, which gave the study its name.<\/p>\n
Researchers have also given the object the name \u201cblack hole star \u2013 one\u201d, in the hope and belief that it will be the first of many to be found. If it is, then it could help explain all of those so-called little red dots.<\/p>\n
\u201cEvery little red dot is consistent with being a black hole star, embedded in a generic early galaxy,\u201d said Professor Naidu. \u201cBut what is special about MoM-BH*-1 is, the black hole star is essentially completely outshining its surrounding host galaxy, such that we\u2019re seeing pure black hole star light.\u201d<\/p>\n
The team behind the new study didn\u2019t intend to find a black hole star. The \u2018Mirage or Miracle\u2019 research aims to look for those distant, early galaxies to discover whether they actually formed during the early part of the universe.<\/p>\n
But as they looked through images from the telescope to try and find those galaxies, they found one feature that stood out: a very red and very bright dot.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen we see something very red in the universe, we often assume that it is surrounded by dust, like soot or ash,\u201d said Robert Simcoe, a co-author on the study. \u201cThe same way that the wildfire smoke from Canada recently made the sky in Boston look bright red, astronomical objects can also appear redder than their intrinsic colour when you see them through a veil of dust.\u201d<\/p>\n
But the light didn\u2019t seem to line up with the dust theory. And the object was behaving in other, strange ways: though it was incredibly bright, the light completely disappeared below certain wavelengths, and it did not include any of the signature of metals or other elements.<\/p>\n
The researchers then ran simulations to work out what other scenarios could produce the red dot\u2019s unusual colour. That suggested that the red dot was an energy source, surrounded by a cocoon of hydrogen \u2013\u00a0but that did not explain why it was so bright.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou have something that looks a bit like a star but is 100 billion times brighter,\u201d Professor Naidu said. \u201cThat means you can\u2019t be powering this by nuclear fusion, which is the energy source that sits at the heart of all the stars we have.\u201d<\/p>\n
A black hole would explain exactly that intense energy, however. And so the researchers included that in their simulation \u2013 and found that the expected brightness of the simulated \u201cblack hole star\u201d matched up with the real results from the telescope.<\/p>\n
The work is reported in a new paper, \u2018A Gas Enshrouded and Gas Reddened Black Hole at Cosmic Dawn\u2019, published in the journal Nature.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Your support helps us to tell the story From reproductive rights to climate change to Big Tech, The…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":735973,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[59,90,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-735972","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-science","tag-gb","tag-science","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/735972","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=735972"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/735972\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/735973"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=735972"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=735972"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=735972"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}