OK so remember when I wrote about black hole stars a few weeks ago? The theoretical monsters that shouldn't exist and yet apparently do? Well the story just got better, because NASA's James Webb Space Telescope spotted one so far away that the light we're seeing left it about 13 billion years ago, when the universe was basically a toddler. 660 million years old. A cosmic kindergartner.

Popular Mechanics has the full breakdown, and the short version is this: JWST keeps finding these tiny red dots in the deep field images, and for a while nobody knew what they were. Just dots. Little smudges of ancient red light that shouldn't have been that bright that early in the universe's history. Now researchers think at least some of them might be black hole stars, which is exactly what it sounds like. A star with a black hole at its center.

Like, sit with that for a second. A black hole. Inside a star. Living in its core, slowly eating it from the inside like the world's most patient tapeworm, except the tapeworm is a gravitational nightmare and the star is millions of times the mass of our sun. These things were hypothesized for years as a way to explain how supermassive black holes got so big so fast in the early universe, because the standard growth rate math just didn't work. Baby black holes shouldn't have had time to become monsters. Unless they were hiding inside enormous stars, munching away, getting bigger on a deadline.

And now JWST may have caught one in the act. The dot's light shows the kind of glow you'd expect from gas swirling around something dense and hungry, way out of proportion for a normal early galaxy. A normal black hole wouldn't look like this. A regular star definitely wouldn't. But a black hole star, mid-snack, billions of years before the earth existed? That fits weirdly well.

The reason it looks red is my favorite part. The expansion of the universe has stretched the light so much on its journey to us that it's been dragged all the way down the spectrum into deep red. The star could have been blazing and it arrives at our mirrors looking like a faint ember. Thirteen billion years of travel and it still showed up, which is honestly kind of romantic.

Nothing is confirmed yet, obviously. This is astronomy, where "we think" is the house language, and the researchers are careful to say they need more observations before anyone engraves anything. There could be another explanation hiding in the data. The universe is extremely good at doing that to people.

But still. A single red pixel in a telescope image might be the fossil of one of the first stars ever to exist, one that swallowed a black hole and won, for a while anyway. We found it by pointing a mirror the size of a tennis court at a patch of darkness and waiting.

Joy is worth documenting with the same seriousness we give everything else, and so is this. Some dots are just dots. This one might be a memory of the beginning.