Alex McColgan

On the other hand, the dramatic Barmer Break indicated a huge amount of relatively homogenous hydrogen gas around it, like you'd expect of a very young star.

Could this be an entirely new type of object?

One that was somehow both black hole and star at once?

De Graaf thought so.

She dubbed the object a black hole star,

A black hole star, unsurprisingly, has characteristics of both black holes and stars.

They're shrouded in giant spheres of hot, dense gas.

which makes them look like the atmospheres of traditional fusion-powered stars.

But instead of running on fusion, they're powered by supermassive black holes accreting matter at breakneck speeds, converting it to energy and releasing light as a result.

But where does all that hydrogen come from?

And if there really was a black hole at the centre, why were there no X-rays?

Although perhaps the biggest question is, how are they made?

The universe seems to be made up of an invisible infrastructure of dark matter, spinning scaffolds called halos.

You can think of them as being embedded in an interconnected web, one that looks surprisingly similar to the networks of neurons in your brain.

We can't see these scaffolds, but we can map them with gravitational lensing, and they seem to indicate the parts of the universe where galaxies form.

Most dark matter halos spin relatively fast,

which causes the gas and matter inside them to spread outward, like the swings on a carnival ride stretching further out the faster they spin.

But a very small fraction of halos spin extremely slowly.

And in those low-spin halos, the gas doesn't spread.

It stays dense, compact and concentrated.