James Webb's mysterious red dots may be 'black hole stars,' a newly discovered cosmic object

In the ancient light of a universe only hundreds of millions of years old, the James Webb Space Telescope has revealed objects that refuse to fit the known categories of cosmic life — small, fiercely glowing red anomalies now believed to be black holes cloaked within vast envelopes of gas, shining with a luminosity a hundred billion times that of our sun. These so-called black hole stars challenge the prevailing timelines of how the cosmos grew and structured itself, suggesting that black holes were not passive footnotes but blazing protagonists in the universe's earliest chapters. What Webb i