Giant Stars With Black Holes Inside Them May Have Been Detected For The First Time
Black holes inside huge balls of scorching hot, turbulent hydrogen could be lighting up the early Universe. (MPIA/HdA/T. Müller/A. de Graaff) (https://www.mpia.de/news/science/2025-06-black-hole-stars)
Some of the mysterious pinpricks of light at the dawn of the Universe could be a type of object we've never seen before.
According to a new analysis of a 'little red dot' (LRD) nicknamed The Cliff, these unexplained objects could be supermassive black holes (https://www.sciencealert.com/black-holes) wrapped in huge, dense clouds of gas, like an atmosphere surrounding a stellar core.
It's a very tidy explanation that solves a problem astronomers are struggling to reconcile: a 'break' in the LRDs' light that makes galaxies in the early Universe seem older than possible.
Related: Earliest Black Hole Ever Confirmed Could Explain Mysterious Red Dots (https://www.sciencealert.com/earliest-black-hole-ever-confirmed-could-explain-mysterious-red-dots)
We ... conclude that the rest-optical and near-infrared continuum of The Cliff cannot originate from a massive, evolved stellar population with an extremely high stellar density,
