NASA's James Webb Telescope Finds Strongest Evidence Yet for 'Black Hole Stars' in Early Universe

Four distinct but thematically linked astronomical results have emerged from JWST observations in June 2026. First, a team led by Vasily Kokorev at the University of Texas at Austin published the deepest spectrum ever obtained of a 'little red dot'—compact, red objects first discovered by JWST in 2022—finding that object GLIMPSE-17775, seen 1.8 billion years after the Big Bang, is most likely a rapidly accreting supermassive black hole enveloped in a dense gas cocoon, a configuration called a 'black hole star' (BH*); the NIRSpec spectrum revealed over 40 spectral lines including an 'iron forest' of 16 iron lines, electron scattering signatures, and helium fluorescence and absorption, all consistent with the BH* model, and gravitational lensing by galaxy cluster Abell S1063 amplified the effective observing time from 30 to 80 hours. Second, a separate team led by Richard Ellis of University College London used JWST and gravitational lensing to apply stellar dynamics to weigh the dormant supermassive black hole at the heart of galaxy MRG-M0138, located 10 billion light-years away, finding a mass of 6 billion solar masses—the most distant black hole ever measured by this technique, extending the previous record of 700 million light-years by a factor of roughly 15. Third, researchers using JWST's NIRSpec instrument mapped asymmetric atmospheric conditions on the tidally locked ultra-hot Jupiter WASP-121 b, confirming that its evening terminator is hotter and more expanded than its morning terminator, with water dissociating in hotter regions and carbon monoxide signals varying across the transit, while current models underpredict the asymmetry, possibly due to unmodeled mineral clouds. Fourth, an MIT-led team identified the earliest known flickering quasar, J0439+1634, whose light dates to 850 million years after the Big Bang; its accretion disk appears unexpectedly thin and ordered for such an early epoch, suggesting massive black holes may complete their most chaotic growth phases before they become visible as bright quasars, with the study published in Nature Astronomy.