JWST Has Discovered a New Class of Space Objects We Didn't Know Existed
By Territory
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In 2022, the James Webb Space Telescope revealed a population of tiny red points of light scattered across its deep field images. Their unusual colors and compact sizes led astronomers to explore a wide range of explanations, from extremely dense young galaxies to heavily obscured black holes, but none of the early ideas were able to fully match the data. Then, a major breakthrough came with the RUBIES survey in 2024, which gathered spectra for thousands of distant galaxies. Among them was an object whose light had travelled 11.9 billion years to reach us. Its spectrum showed an unusually sharp Balmer break, a feature created when hydrogen absorbs light at specific energies. This steep structure made the object resemble a single, very hot star more than an entire galaxy, and the team named it The Cliff. No standard galaxy or black hole model could reproduce its dramatic signature. Researchers were pushed to consider a new idea called a black hole star. In this scenario, a supermassiv
Tags: jwst, james webb, james webb telescope, deep field image, james webb deep field image, james webb rubies program, black hole stars
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