Astronomers have discovered a "Black Hole Star" with a light signature more extreme than any known star in the universe.
March 31, 2026
Original Paper
A Black Hole Star at Cosmic Noon: Extreme Balmer break, photospheric continuum, and broad absorption by thick winds in a Little Red Dot at z=1.7
arXiv · 2603.28335
The Takeaway
The mysterious object PAN-BH*-1 appears to be a single red sun, but its light is so intense it defies standard models of stellar atmospheres. Researchers believe it is actually a massive black hole cloaked in a thick, glowing shell of gas that creates a fake "surface," mimicking a star while hiding a massive amount of energy in a tiny, star-like dot.
From the abstract
Recent studies at high redshift have revealed an enigmatic class of Little Red Dots (LRDs) with extreme Balmer breaks, stronger than in any stellar atmosphere. However, it is unclear whether such objects exist at lower redshift, especially given the low number of LRDs reported at $z\lesssim 2$. Here we report the discovery of PAN-BH*-1, an LRD with an extreme Balmer break at $z=1.73$, identified from JWST/NIRCam pure-parallel imaging taken by the PANORAMIC survey, and confirmed by deep VLT/X-Sho