Astronomers discover 'black hole stars'—a brand-new cosmic object from the early universe

In the faint light of the early universe, astronomers have encountered objects that resist familiar categories — neither purely stars nor purely black holes, but something in between, wrapped in glowing gas and roughly the size of our solar system. These so-called black hole stars, appearing as reddish pinpoints in deep-space surveys, may hold the answer to one of cosmology's most enduring questions: how the universe assembled its largest black holes so swiftly after the Big Bang. Their discovery reminds us that the cosmos, even after decades of careful observation, still conceals entire class