Understanding the early universe is a foundational goal in space science. We're driven to understand nature and how it evolved from a super-heated plasma after the Big Bang to the structured cosmos we ...

Astronomers have sought to explain the existence of supermassive black holes forming less than a billion years after the Big Bang, a timescale incompatible with standard stellar evolution processes.

Scientists using NASA's James Webb Space Telescope now think the "little red dots" spotted in the early universe could be a new kind of space object. They call it a "black hole star." Credit: T.