There are facts about the universe that don’t just surprise you; they break your internal sense of reasoning.

They induce a kind of cosmic dizziness, reminding us that human intuition is entirely unequipped for the realities of deep space. They're so far removed from your daily worldview, that you'd never even come close to considering such a thing.

It's exactly these type of mysteries that keep me fascinated and, of course, looking up!

Here is one of those facts.

Try, for a moment, to hold the Milky Way galaxy in your mind. Picture the sweeping spiral arms, the sprawling nebulas, the hundreds of billions of glowing suns in our night sky, the exoplanets, and the vast, drifting oceans of interstellar gas. If you could somehow gather all of that visible matter and place it on a cosmic scale, it would weigh roughly 60 to 64 billion times the mass of our Sun.¹

It is an empire of light, sprawling across 100,000 light-years.

Now, consider an object known as Tonantzintla 618 (TON 618).

TON 618 is not a galaxy. It is a single, supermassive black hole. And its mass is estimated at 66 billion solar masses.

Take a moment to let that settle. Floating out in the deep dark of the cosmos is a single, gravitationally collapsed point in spacetime that has swallowed more physical matter than exists in the entirety of our galactic home. If you crushed every star you have ever seen, our sun, the Earth, and the dust between them into a single sphere of darkness, you would still be a few billion suns short of TON 618.

It is a leviathan that defies comprehension. But for astronomers, it also presents a maddening paradox: How did it get so big?

Black holes are traditionally thought to grow by feeding on passing matter - slowly stripping gas from stars or swallowing cosmic dust. But supermassive titans like TON 618 existed too early in the universe’s history to have reached their staggering size through casual snacking. There simply hasn't been enough time since the Big Bang for a black hole to eat 66 billion suns one by one. It is like walking into a nursery and finding a towering giant.

Astrophysicists knew there had to be a missing link. They needed a shortcut.

And in August 2026, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) may have finally found it.

While peering deep into the dawn of the universe -just 660 million years after the Big Bang - an international team of astronomers zeroed in on a mysterious, glowing "little red dot." What they found was not a standard star, nor a standard black hole. It was a cosmic chimera.

Officially designated MoM-BH*-1, this object is a newly discovered class of astrophysics: a "black hole star."

It is roughly the size of our entire solar system. It shines 100 billion times brighter than our sun, completely outshining its host galaxy. But its brilliant red glow is not powered by nuclear fusion. Instead, it is a nascent black hole swaddled in an unimaginably thick, dense cocoon of hydrogen gas. The black hole is effectively wearing a giant star as a disguise, violently gorging on the gas from the inside out.

The universe, it seems, loves to blur a boundary. We have long thought of black holes and stars as two distinct phases of cosmic evolution- a star lives, it dies, and its corpse becomes a black hole. But MoM-BH*-1 proves that in the early universe, they were sometimes one and the same.

These bizarre, primordial "stars" are the incubators. By hiding inside massive clouds of gas, early black holes were able to feed at phenomenal rates, bypassing normal growth limits. A glowing red dot 660 million years after the Big Bang may just be the heavy seed that would eventually swallow enough of the cosmos to become a leviathan like TON 618.

When we look up at the dark patches between the stars, we aren't just looking at emptiness. We are looking at a wilderness that is far stranger, than we ever dared to imagine.

TON 618

Astronomers discover a new kind of cosmic object – a black hole ‘star’

1. The math here hides am interesting quirk of the cosmos. Our galaxy contains hundreds of billions of individual stars, but the vast majority (roughly 80%) of them are red dwarfs weighing a fraction of our Sun. It takes hundreds of billions of them to add up to 60 billion solar masses. Add in a few billion solar masses worth of drifting interstellar gas, and you arrive at the visible weight of our galactic home.

Cover Image: Size comparison of the event horizons of the black hole of TON 618 and the orbit of Neptune. By Faren29 and Dabmasterars, CC BY-SA 4.0, Link