Black Hole Stars

Somewhere out there, billions of light years away, astronomers think they’ve stumbled across something that by rights should not exist. They are calling them black hole stars, which sounds like the name of a B-side Pink Floyd track, but in truth it is one of the stranger contenders for “weirdest thing in space” right now. If it holds up, it could reshape what we know about how the universe grew, how black holes were born, and maybe even open the door to questions we are not clever enough to ask yet.

The James Webb Space Telescope has been staring so far back in time that it is basically spying on the universe’s awkward teenage years. What it found were faint little red dots, not quite galaxies, not quite quasars, not quite anything that fits neatly into a textbook. One theory is that these dots are black holes wrapped in dense envelopes of gas. Instead of vanishing into silence, they are glowing like stars because the gas they are consuming lights up as it falls in. Imagine cosmic campfires where the logs are entire star systems being ripped apart.

And here’s the part that tickles me. We are sitting here on our little rock, third from the Sun, nodding sagely and saying things like “ah yes this means that” and “oh indeed that distant smudge is definitely this, probably, as far as we can tell.” I love how humanity plays this endless pantomime of experts explaining the unknown to the rest of us, as though mystery can be cleared away by better diagrams. It was not that long ago that explorers of the seas were treated with the same reverence we give astronauts today. They returned with strange objects, strange stories, and a sense of danger survived, while crowds pressed in with awe. People back then thought themselves modern too, wearing the latest fashions, convinced they were the pinnacle of progress. No doubt isolated tribes in the Pacific thought the same, until the day a ship appeared on the horizon and the local sage of mysteries suddenly found themselves without a job. The part that really makes me grin is that we are still doing exactly the same thing.

Which brings us back to the red dots. Are they the early screams of black holes being born, or are they something else entirely? If they can mimic stars, how many have already slipped past us disguised as ordinary pinpricks in the sky? We cannot check. We cannot touch. We are left with educated guesses and confident pronouncements that will probably look foolish in fifty years.

And this is where the intrigue starts to creep in. Because if you were the sort of civilisation that wanted to hide your comings and goings, what better place than inside a glowing shroud of gas around a black hole? No radar, no silhouette, just a neat label slapped on by well-meaning scientists: “peculiar star, nothing to see here.” The perfect camouflage. We will happily dismiss it as astrophysics and move on.

Of course the sensible explanation is that these are baby black holes wearing gas blankets, lighting up the universe while they feast. That will probably remain the safe answer until something stranger barges in. But astronomy has a bad track record when it comes to certainty. Once upon a time the Earth was the centre of everything. Later the Milky Way was the whole universe. Now we are squinting at red dots and calling them stars with black holes inside. Progress, of a sort.

So perhaps these dots are cosmic frauds. Perhaps they are ancient footprints. Or perhaps they are exactly what the experts say, though that would almost be the most boring outcome of all. The only thing we can say with confidence is that when we stare at the night sky, not every star is a star. And the universe still has far more imagination than we do.