Astronomers discover a brand-new type of astrophysical object: A black hole star

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By Jennifer Chu | MIT News. 

Excerpt: Astronomers at MIT and elsewhere have spotted an extremely bright red spot [that] resembles an enormous star, spanning the size of our solar system. But it also is putting out 100 billion times more energy than any known star can physically produce. ...astronomers are calling it a “black hole star.” In a paper appearing today in the journal Nature, the team presents their analysis of the new object, which they discovered using NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). The telescope spotted the bright red dot in the very early universe, just a few hundred million years after the Big Bang. ...The object is likely a hugely dense cloud of gas, powered not by standard nuclear fusion, but by a central black hole ...100,000 times as massive as the sun.... 

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