Science For Sleep | JWST Just Found the First Black Hole Inside a Star

Now on Spotify 🎧 Listen here: https://open.spotify.com/show/033FAXP... Far back in the early universe, the James Webb Space Telescope has found an object that may reveal how enormous black holes grew so quickly after the Big Bang. The object, known as MoM-BH-1, appears as one of JWST’s mysterious “little red dots.” But instead of being an impossibly massive black hole, it may be something stranger: a relatively smaller black hole buried inside an extremely dense, star-like cocoon of hydrogen gas. That cocoon could change everything. By trapping and repeatedly scattering radiation, the surrounding gas may allow the black hole to feed faster than the usual Eddington limit. At the same time, that scattering can broaden the light coming from the system, making the black hole appear much more massive than it really is. If this interpretation is correct, some of the seemingly gigantic black holes found in the universe’s first billion years may not have started out so enormous at all. They may have begun as smaller seeds and then grown extraordinarily quickly inside dense envelopes of gas. Let this gentle exploration of the possible first black hole found inside a star-like cocoon settle softly into your thoughts. Breathe slowly. Imagine a young black hole hidden inside a glowing sphere of hydrogen, quietly feeding in the darkness while the first galaxies are still taking shape around it. And rest in the stillness of a universe where some of its earliest monsters may have grown inside something that looked almost like a star. Sources: A gas-enshrouded and gas-reddened black hole at cosmic dawn — https://www.nature.com/articles/s4158... Little red dots as young supermassive black holes in dense ionized cocoons — https://www.nature.com/articles/s4158... The case for super-Eddington accretion in JWST broad-line active galactic nuclei during the first billion years — https://www.nature.com/articles/s4155... The growth of light seed black holes in the early Universe — https://www.nature.com/articles/s4155... A direct black-hole mass measurement in a little red dot at high redshift — https://www.nature.com/articles/s4158...