Giant stars can grow so large that they accidentally swallow entire black holes and keep them inside their cores.
April 29, 2026
Original Paper
Supermassive stars with embedded stellar black hole cores: dense assembling star clusters as faint multiple Little Red Dot systems
arXiv · 2604.22924
The Takeaway
Simulations show that stellar black holes can become embedded within the gaseous layers of supermassive quasi-stars in dense clusters. The black hole at the center feeds on the surrounding star, providing the energy to keep the massive gas shell from collapsing. These bizarre cosmic structures could explain the mysterious Little Red Dots that the James Webb Space Telescope has found in the early universe. This means some of the brightest objects we see in the dawn of time are actually giant stellar cocoons for hungry black holes. Understanding these hybrids reveals how the first massive black holes in the universe grew so quickly.
From the abstract
Numerical simulations have established that star clusters with densities comparable to the high redshift ($z>6$-$10$) James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) proto globular clusters may build up extremely massive (EMSs; $m_\mathrm{\star}>1000 M_\odot$) or even supermassive stars (SMSs; $m_\mathrm{\star}>10000 M_\odot$) and potentially intermediate mass black holes (IMBHs) through runaway stellar collisions. Using direct simulations of assembling star clusters including post-Newtonian black hole dynami