#BlackHoleStar is the hashtag for the August 12, 2026 announcement, published in Nature and covered by MIT News, Science Daily, Interesting Engineering and Yahoo News, that James Webb Space Telescope observations of MoM-BH*-1 — a small, extraordinarily luminous red object in the constellation Cetus seen as it was roughly 660 million years after the Big Bang — appear to match the long-theorized “quasi-star” or “black hole star.” The candidate object, found in JWST’s Mirage or Miracle (MoM) survey, looks like a central black hole of about 100,000 solar masses wrapped in a solar-system-sized envelope of hot hydrogen, radiating an estimated 100 billion times more energy than a typical star — potentially the first identified example of an entire class of objects that theorists have argued should have existed in the early universe.
Quick Facts
- Announced: August 12, 2026, in Nature; MIT News summary published the same day
- Object: MoM-BH*-1
- Location: constellation Cetus
- Cosmic epoch seen: roughly 660 million years after the Big Bang
- Estimated central black hole mass: ~100,000 solar masses
- Envelope: hot hydrogen, roughly the diameter of our Solar System
- Luminosity: ~10^11 times that of a typical star (per Nature and MIT News)
- Survey: JWST “Mirage or Miracle” (MoM) program; NIRSpec spectroscopy
- Claimed status: first candidate quasi-star / black hole star ever identified
Origin of the Hashtag
The hashtag emerged during the media wave triggered by MIT News’s August 12 write-up and Nature’s paper the same week. Astronomy accounts on X and Bluesky, along with mainstream science coverage on Yahoo News, Interesting Engineering and Science Daily, all reached for the phrase “black hole star” — the accessible, striking framing the paper’s authors used to describe what a quasi-star would look like in practice. Wikipedia editors created a dedicated page for MoM-BH*-1 within days.
What Was Found
Two things made MoM-BH*-1 stand out in JWST data:
- Its size and brightness: the source is spatially unresolved — a point of light on JWST’s imager — but shines at an inferred luminosity that would rival the entire host galaxy. It is much too bright and too compact to be a normal early-universe galaxy or star cluster.
- Its spectrum: NIRSpec observations captured emission and absorption features consistent with a hot, dense hydrogen envelope surrounding a compact central engine — exactly what the quasi-star models predict.
Together, those signatures let the team argue that they were looking at a black hole of tens of thousands of solar masses accreting gas from an enveloping, star-like cocoon, rather than at a conventional galaxy, quasar or hot star.
Why It Matters
Supermassive black holes millions to billions of solar masses in size have been detected in some of the earliest galaxies JWST has observed — much earlier than any conventional formation channel comfortably explains. A quasi-star phase, in which a black hole seeds inside a huge gas envelope and grows quickly without being ejected by feedback, has been one of the leading theoretical solutions. Confirming MoM-BH*-1 as a real black hole star, and finding more like it, would provide direct observational support for that pathway and reshape the discussion of how the first supermassive black holes formed.
Cultural Impact
Even before independent confirmation, the discovery had immediate cross-over appeal. MIT News called it a “brand-new type of astrophysical object”; Science Daily’s headline focused on the “100 billion times brighter than a star” figure; Yahoo News and Interesting Engineering both went with the “black hole star” phrase, which spread quickly on X and Reddit science communities. It became one of the year’s most-shared astronomy stories, alongside the launch of the Roman Space Telescope two weeks later, and it added to a broader public argument in 2026 that JWST is delivering surprises about the early universe faster than theorists can process them.
Sources
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MoM-BH*-1
- https://news.mit.edu/2026/astronomers-discover-brand-new-type-astrophysical-object-black-hole-star-0812
- https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2026/08/260813045538.htm
- https://interestingengineering.com/space/first-known-black-hole-star-discovered
- https://www.yahoo.com/news/science/articles/jwst-just-spotted-black-hole-165952805.html