Quasi-stars are hypothesized to exist in the early universe, a class of object proposed by astrophysicist Mitchell Begelman and colleagues.1 But of all the astronomy data we have ever collected using modern, state-of-the-art telescopes, the confirmed count of quasi-stars stands at exactly zero. Yet MoM-BH*-1 has been dubbed one—and to add insult to injury, it has also been labelled a “red dot”, all while being far brighter than our Sun.
The Discovery of the Infrared Source
Back in 2023, multiple surveys were conducted under the name “Mirage or Miracle”, short for MoM, and MoM-BH*-1 was discovered in the data from that survey. The data was gathered using the James Webb Space Telescope’s instruments, such as the Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI) and NIRCam.2
The same survey also found a galaxy named MoM-z14, with a redshift of about z = 14.44, roughly 280 million years after the Big Bang.3 MoM-BH*-1, by contrast, has a redshift of about z = 7.7569, placing it some 660 million years after the Big Bang.2 Its brightness was studied through spectrometry, which looks for the distinct signature of hydrogen gas—the Balmer break—with data fitting and model fitting running behind the scenes. According to Naidu and his team, the object is an accreting supermassive black hole—about a hundred thousand times the mass of the Sun—wrapped in a dense cocoon of hydrogen gas roughly the size of our solar system.4,5
In 2026, Rohan P. Naidu and his team proposed, after data modelling, that this object could be a hypothetical type of quasi-star—despite the fact that others in academia offered differing interpretations too.4 Under their picture, this hypothetical object is a black hole enveloped by dense gas and “choking” on it. Yet what the observation actually shows is a red, pixelated blob, with no clear indication of whether it sits within a galaxy or whether that galaxy is simply obscured by the limits of our data. Either way, the blob itself may be no larger than roughly our own solar system.
Are We in for Science, or Mythos and Stories?
You see, neither you nor I can travel there across such epochs of time and verify for ourselves what that object really is, right? We have to rely on physics to help us answer these questions. Of course, our models are very good—no doubt about it. But the problem is the “falsifiability” of a model. If, to keep the model alive, they can apply renormalisation to make everything fit the data, then it is not falsifiable: data-fitting ensures that everything matches the model, or the hypothesis within it.
Instead of stating plainly that we have hit the limits of our instruments, and that better future instruments will help us understand this object with more concrete data, a verdict of “quasi-star black hole” has already been delivered—one that has been picked up by mainstream media and spread across social media networks, showing awe and wonder at a monumental discovery, while that red pixelated blob remains shrouded in mystery.
Have you ever thought about why humans, especially in early civilizations, chose stories as a vessel for conveying knowledge? It is because when a person intuits something about the world out there—concerning notions of reality—it is abstract. I refer to it as “experiential knowledge”: knowledge that is experienced through emotions of wonder rather than through passive facts about reality.6 That abstraction cannot easily survive in a culture primarily rooted in oral tradition. The person who has had this experience shares it with those close to them, and their community; that generation understands the intuited knowledge to some degree, of course. But as knowledge is passed down through generations, the experiential knowledge is lost, and what you are left with is a call to stay part of the group, to embody its beliefs. Right there, knowledge becomes inert and turns into dogma.
Science, of course, is certainly not here for stories. In fact, it broke away from those traditions of the past, where the truth of the matter was to be dictated by observation—and that is true for the most part. However, here is where I now see science turning into a dogma, or, as Kuhn termed it, a “paradigm”.6 They prefer to remain within their rigid frameworks. Try it—go ahead and tell them it could be a star, or a small quasar, and they will tell you: “According to our model, that is incorrect.” And that is because the data you would be using is already inadequate.
So, between the handful of existing models and the constant renormalisation of data to ensure those models are right, we are not being given science—we are being given a new-age religion, and I find that genuinely concerning. Narratives can foster bias, and you know where human biases lead: to a bleak future for humanity as a whole.
