Overview
- A team led by Rohan P. Naidu published a Nature paper on August 12 that places the compact source MoM-BH*-1 at redshift 7.7569, about 660 million years after the Big Bang.
- Spectra from JWST show an unprecedentedly large Balmer break, broad hydrogen emission combined with deep hydrogen absorption, and an almost complete lack of metal lines that together rule out ordinary stellar populations.
- The authors’ preferred model fits an accreting black hole of roughly 10^5–10^7 solar masses surrounded by an almost dust-free hydrogen envelope with a characteristic scale of about 10–100 astronomical units that acts like a star-like photosphere.
- The interpretation is provisional because independent work shows a metal-free supermassive star can reproduce several features, and the team’s reported ~30% brightening over two months is treated only as a tentative hint pending targeted follow-up.
- Decisive tests now planned include repeated imaging for variability, deeper high-resolution NIRSpec spectra to map line structure, and X-ray and radio observations to search for hidden high-energy emission that would confirm or rule out the black-hole-star scenario.