Astronomers have stumbled upon a brand new kind of cosmic object that's part black hole, part star, and 100% confusing. It's called a 'black hole star' - because naming things is hard - and it's roughly the size of our entire solar system, glowing ominously in brilliant red.

The discovery came courtesy of NASA's James Webb Space Telescope, which was busy hunting for the most distant galaxies in the known universe. Instead, it found a mysterious red spot lurking in the constellation of Cetus, the Whale, about 30 billion light-years from Earth. The object formed just 660 million years after the Big Bang, which is practically yesterday in cosmic terms.

Here's the kicker: while this thing looks like an enormous star, it's releasing 100 billion times more energy than any star we know of. That's more in line with a black hole's appetite than a star's modest glow. Dr. Rohan Naidu of MIT's Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research put it best: 'We have found a new type of astrophysical object, a black hole star,' which 'shines with the energy typically associated with black holes, but at the same time bears signatures classically associated with stars.' In other words, it's a cosmic chimera.

The team, who published their findings in Nature, zeroed in on an extremely bright red spot dubbed MoM-BH*-1 - the reddest object in the telescope's image archive. Its light is so dramatically red and cuts off so abruptly at a certain wavelength that it defies comparison with any known object. Computer simulations suggest that rather than being powered by nuclear fusion like a regular star, this is a black hole wrapped in dense gas shrouds that make it radiate like a star. So it's a black hole wearing a star costume.

If true, this could explain the mysterious 'Little Red Dots' (LRDs) that pop up in nearly every deep-space image from James Webb. They might all be black hole stars. Naidu thinks these objects could be the seeds of supermassive black holes like the one at the center of the Milky Way. 'For decades we have anticipated something spectacular must be afoot in the very early universe. Black hole stars may be the 'something spectacular',' he said. They could represent the 'nascent, swaddled phase' that kicks off nearly every supermassive black hole's journey.

And why should we care about supermassive black holes? Because they sit at the centers of almost all galaxies, including ours, and they dictate the fate of those galaxies. As Naidu explains, they 'may govern when stars are able to form and when they cease forming, setting the course for everything that follows from star formation: the birth of planets, the rise of life, the emergence of species that may one day piece together this entire history.' So basically, these black hole stars are the cosmic architects of everything, and we've just found their blueprint.