When Soundgarden wrote “Black Hole Sun,” they may have been onto something more than just a hit song. Astronomers have discovered an object that’s the size of our solar system, glowing bright red and believed to be a black hole star, thanks to the James Webb Space Telescope.

The findings, based on observations from JWST, are part of a new paper in Nature. The researchers focused on distant phenomena that appear like giant stars but, according to their emissions, seem to be black holes shrouded in dense and luminous gas. These objects have been dubbed ‘black hole stars’.

The signal at the center of the study comes from a time when the universe was just 660 million years old (it's now almost 14 billion). One such object, known as MoM-BH*-1, emits about 100 billion times more energy than any star could produce through nuclear fusion. Its light also disappears abruptly, too intensely to be explained by normal star behavior.

This leads scientists to the black hole star hypothesis: a black hole at the center devouring matter and releasing enormous amounts of energy, surrounded by a massive gas envelope. The energy passes through this gas before escaping into space, acquiring characteristics similar to starlight. This discovery could help address another mystery uncovered by JWST—the frequent appearance of small red spots in the early universe.