What’s a “black hole star” BH*? #shorts

By Dr. Becky

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So the idea is all these pieces of the puzzle of little red dots are coming from the fact we’re seeing reprocessed light emitted from matter glowing as it swirls around the black hole. So this is the hypothesis that has emerged over the past few years, it’s annoyingly known as the “black hole star” model, because it’s represented as BH* in research papers, in the same way the Milky Way’s supermassive black hole is known as “sag a*” - I know it’s incredibly confusing because quite literally nothing to do with stars. But, point is, we need to test this black hole buried in dense gas hypothesis. So that’s what Kokorev and collaborators were trying to do when they observed the little red dot known as GLIMPSE-17775 using the NIRspec instrument on JWST for 20 hours to try and collect as much light as possible. It’s around 11 and a half billion light years away so we’re seeing this galaxy as it was when the Universe was just 2 billion years old. And the spectrum they got is so incredibl