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Imagine astronomers looking at our very, very early universe, just a little after the big bang, and seeing supermassive monster black holes weighing billions of suns. But according to all known laws of physics, they simply shouldn't be there, because, as we know, they take billions of years to grow like that. Yet they exist, huge against the laws of physics, turning into a real cosmic puzzle that we will have to solve. And so the James Webb Space Telescope stumbles upon what astronomers call little red dots. At first, they were mistaken for ordinary distant galaxies, but one such dot forced astronomers to reconsider this explanation.
It turns out that we are looking at a completely, seemingly impossible hybrid star. It's a supermassive star the size of our entire solar system, and right at its center, a black hole is somehow lurking, greedily devouring gas. This black hole is inside the star. So how could something like this even happen? And why the hell hasn't the black hole ruptured its outer shell yet? Okay, let's go back to the young universe. Then, real gas leviathans could form , whose mass was thousands of times greater than the mass of our sun. Now imagine the central part of this monster star collapsing into a black hole. But a collapse at the core doesn't mean the entire star has to blow apart. This huge
outer gas shell remains in place. It turns out a very strange picture. There's already a black hole sitting at the center of this thing, but it's surrounded on the outside by a colossal mass of gas. And now this huge structure is becoming a giant cosmic buffet for the newborn black hole at its center. Frankly speaking, this concept is not something completely new. Back in the 1970s, Kipthorne and Anna Zhitkov identified stars that harbored neutron stars. Later, scientists modeled another version, a black hole inside a massive gas shell. In scientific circles, these wild hybrids are called quasi-stars. Well, to make it all sound a little more adequate. And now, half a century later, the Webb telescope
actually captures one of these objects. But wait, this thing is at the very edge of the visible universe, billions of light years away. So, as a matter of fact, scientists finally realized that the little red dot in the photo is actually a supermassive black hole, hidden in a dense gas envelope. In short, scientists spread the light from this dot out into a spectrum and saw an absolutely crazy anomaly. In astrophysics, there is a phenomenon called the Balmer jump. Simply put, at one specific wavelength, hydrogen atoms begin to absorb photons. On the chart, it looks like a sharp decline, a steep step down, like a cliff. As you know, there are billions of stars in a typical galaxy. Their shared light smooths out this sharp decline. For a star
cluster, there is a limit to how large this difference can be. Factor five. But for our little red dot Mamb Star 1, the difference was 7.7. So what does this mean? Essentially, this tells us that we are not looking at a star cluster. No existing galaxy could create something so bizarre. The signal is dominated by something much more compact and extreme. The light appears to come from a single massive source, tightly wrapped in an unnaturally dense hydrogen cocoon. And it is this cocoon that devours such a huge portion of light. Okay, that explains the shell. But why does this thing look red at all? Most often, everything is blamed on cosmic dust, because it both absorbs and scatters short light
waves. Essentially, it removes blue light and makes the object appear redder. But when astronomers looked at other similarly small red dots, they found significantly less radiation from the dust than they expected. It just was n't possible to write everything off. The reason lies in the gas itself. The ultra-dense hydrogen cocoon itself performs a significant portion of this filtration. It seems to filter out short waves. So the light that does manage to get through appears much redder to us. From such a tremendous distance, this entire bizarre structure looks to us like just one tiny red dot. Okay.
We now know that inside this gaseous envelope sits a black hole that is actively consuming matter. But how did it happen that this wild amount of energy still hasn't torn the star to pieces, contrary to all expectations? Well, according to the laws of physics, black holes have a kind of feeding speed limit. How much and how fast they can eat. This is known as the Eddington limit. This is how it works. When gas falls into a black hole, extreme friction and compression cause it to heat up and emit incredibly bright light. But here's the thing. It is the light that pushes the gas back. If the hole starts to absorb matter too quickly, the glow of the superheated gas becomes so intense that its pressure literally pushes this new portion of matter back out.
Essentially, the black hole begins to choke on its own light. It's just too much and too fast. But in the quasi-star model, a black hole can feed much faster than the usual Edinousson limit allows. And yet the pressure from all this light doesn't rupture the outer hydrogen shell. So how does she even continue to survive? As crazy as it may sound, this star literally sustains its existence through its own destruction. Of course, Zorya is alive thanks to thermonuclear fusion, but this behemoth is inflated and kept from complete collapse by the radiation released when it is eaten by a black hole. This is where the shell itself comes to the rescue. It weighs much, much more than a black hole. So the gravity
holding this whole structure together is just enormous. To tear off the outer layers and scatter them in space, light would have to overcome the gravity of the entire structure. This means that the entire object can glow much brighter before the shell starts to blow away. So a black hole can eat much faster and still not blow up its own dinner. Cool, hehe. But where does all this energy from such overeating go? It heats the shell, the hot gas rises, and the colder gas sinks. Just like water heating up in a pot on the stove. These flows carry heat from the depths to the surface, where it is radiated into space. Gravity pulls the shell inward. While the pressure of superheated gas and light pushes it outward. As long as these
forces balance each other, the shell holds together, the black hole continuously devours matter, and the energy released prevents the entire shell from instantly collapsing into the abyss. Okay. This kind of nutrition explains how the black hole could grow so quickly, but also how big it became. To weigh it, or more precisely estimate its mass, we have to look through that same dense hydrogen window. And you're probably thinking, how the hell are you even going to weigh that black hole at the very edge of the universe? Well, you can't put it on the scale, that's obvious. So what do scientists do? First, they watch the gas swirl around the hole, like water swirling in a drain. And to determine its speed, they
use the Doppler effect. Do you know how it works? Like an ambulance siren. As it gets closer to you, the sound gets louder, and as it gets farther away, it gets quieter. It's the same story with light. Imagine this glowing gas hurtling around in circles at insane speeds. That part of the gas that's flying straight at you, uh, compresses its light waves. So for our instruments, our telescopes, this light becomes a little stronger or stronger, and the gas moving away from us, in turn, stretches the waves, making the light redder. But because this object is really super-duper far away, almost as far away as you can imagine, the telescope sees this single blue and red light
mixed together. So on scientists' graphs, a thin spectral line usually blurs into a much wider one, and the logic here is ironclad. The heavier the black hole, the stronger its gravity. The stronger the gravity, the faster the gas rushes around it. And the higher the speed, the more the colors mix and the wider this line on the graph becomes. So scientists look at the radiation from these little red dots. see an extremely blurry, broad line and draw an obvious conclusion. Oho! Their gas is moving at some crazy speed, which means that there's an absolute monster sitting inside, a black hole weighing billions of our suns. There is only one problem. Before this light
reaches us, it has to pass through this surrounding massive thick wall of gas or shell, or whatever you want to call it. By studying other similarly small red dots, scientists have found signs of so-called electron scattering. This is when photons constantly hit free electrons in the gas and bounce off them like ping-pong balls. And each such collision can slightly change the energy of the photon. And here's what's important. This ricochet could also widen the line on the chart, even if it itself collapses around the hole at breakneck speeds, as we assumed. And that's how the
cocoon fooled astronomers. Scientists believed the line was wide because the gas was moving incredibly fast. But some of that width may actually be due to light reflecting off the inside of the cocoon. Take this into account, recalculate everything. And it turns out that some of these black holes are tens of times less massive than we thought. Hmm. What a mess. And Mumby H star1 may be doing a similar trick, meaning its black hole may be smaller than conventional mass estimates suggest. So, the cocoon does two things at once. It helps the black hole grow faster, but it also makes it harder for us to understand how big it really is. But those
billion-solar-mass monsters from the beginning of the video are still a mystery. Lowering the mass estimates of a few Little Red Dots does not solve the problem of early black holes in general. So if these objects from the very beginning of our universe were once so massive and voracious, where the hell are they now? Why don't we see quasi-stars, for example, in our neighborhood? After all, the web didn't find one or two such little red dots, it found hundreds. And we see a particularly large number of these objects in the young universe. If at least a significant portion of them are such objects, then the early universe could have had a whole assembly line of black hole incubators. In the young universe, the conditions for
their appearance were much more common. Later, such objects became much rarer, but these space dinosaurs are not yet completely extinct. We find similar objects at later stages in the history of the universe. But what happened to these black holes themselves? In the quasi-star model, this incubator disappears over time. The black hole eats up a bunch of the shell, and the rest of the gas dissipates. And so the black hole comes out, or rather it simply remains the only thing that survives. From that point on, it could continue to grow and eventually turn into one of those supermassive monsters we see in the centers of galaxies today.
Webo may have just managed to photograph one of them in her awkward teenage years while she was still locked in her space incubator. So maybe that's the answer. Perhaps these giant black holes didn't just miraculously appear to be huge. Perhaps the early universe gave them a way to grow incredibly fast, hiding inside these giant gas shells. And if this is indeed what the web is showing us, then perhaps we have finally discovered that same missed stage between newborn black hole babies and the giant monsters we see today in the centers of galaxies. And that's very cool.
