James Webb Spots a New Class of Star Fueled by Black Holes

Using the James Webb Space Telescope, scientists identified a new object class—'black hole stars'—dense gas clouds fully enveloping a black hole that are powered by the black hole’s energy rather than fusion, yielding a brightness about 100 billion times that of a normal star. These objects appear as extremely bright red dots in Webb’s deep-field images from the cosmic dawn, implying such systems formed in the early universe and could shed light on how supermassive black holes arise; they are not accretion disks and require further study.