When the James Webb Space Telescope began science operations in 2022, astronomers noticed freckles across almost every deep field: tiny, fiercely red points. Researchers initially called them little red dots
as an admission of defeat, and the informal name stuck. For a while, the dots appeared to break cosmology according to reporting from Scientific American. Read as young galaxies, they looked too massive and settled for a universe only a few hundred million years old. Cast as supermassive black holes gorging on gas, they lacked the X-ray and radio emissions that normally accompany that feeding process. They were abundant in the first billion years and largely gone by two billion.
Rohan Naidu’s Team Names MoM-BH*-1 in Nature Study
A survey team led by Rohan Naidu, then at MIT’s Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research and now at the University of Hawai’i, targeted an object redder and brighter than everything around it in a survey they named Mirage or Miracle
as published in Nature in August. Their analysis yielded a black hole around 100,000 times the mass of the sun, wrapped in hydrogen so dense and extensive that the arrangement glows like an enormous star roughly the width of the solar system.
The research team named the object MoM-BH*-1, with its light leaving when the universe was roughly 660 million years old. Co-author Robert Simcoe, who directs MIT’s Kavli Institute, noted that red usually signifies dust, similar to wildfire smoke. However, the spectrum displayed a sharp cliff known as a Balmer break. Naidu called it the deepest break we have ever observed in any object,
noting it was too extreme for an ordinary star.
Anna de Graaff and Max Planck Institute Findings on The Cliff
The concept did not emerge from a single paper. In September 2025, Anna de Graaff at the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy and colleagues reported an extreme dot nicknamed The Cliff
after failing to match it with existing models of dusty galaxies or dust-shrouded black holes. De Graaff and Naidu concluded they were looking at a combination of a black hole’s vigor and a star’s outward appearance.
De Graaff added regarding proximity, I wouldn’t want to come too close.
In this model, the black hole acts as the engine, pulling in gas to heat it and push energy outward, preventing the outer hydrogen layers from collapsing.
Vasily Kokorev and Vadim Rusakov Add Spectral Clarity
Additional research has reinforced the model. In June, a team led by Vasily Kokorev at the University of Texas at Austin used a foreground galaxy cluster as a magnifying glass to capture the deepest spectrum yet of a single dot, GLIMPSE-17775, revealing more than 40 spectral lines pointing to a black hole inside a hot cocoon as reported by the European Space Agency.
Meanwhile, a group including Vadim Rusakov at the University of Manchester examined broad emission lines that normally suggest fast-moving gas swirling around a black hole. They suggested that light scattering off electrons accounts for much of the color spread, which would indicate black holes about a hundred times lighter than earlier estimates.
Unresolved Questions and Future Observations
Despite converging models, nobody has photographed a black hole inside a gas shell. How the envelope forms and survives while enclosing a consuming black hole remains open, and rival explanations involving dense star clusters have not been ruled out. Models suggest MoM-BH*-1 sits next to a brighter galaxy and will merge with it in about 100 million years according to European Research Council summaries.
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