A Dutch bank published an analysis that estimated heat waves and drought could reduce gross domestic product across the European Union by 1 percent for 2026.

Bolsa Chica and Huntington state beaches reported more than 3,100 incidents so far this year, twice the number for all of 2025.

Dozens of miles of underground water pipes could prove useful beyond the winter months as the risk of wildfires grows.

The initial figures are based on an extrapolation of costs compiled by France’s official statistics agency.

Within the brain, neurons compute by generating electrical impulses. These signals travel throughout neurons, which are in turn connected in vast networks that control brain functions such as sensory perception, memory formation, and control of movement. 

In an advance that could help neuroscientists map those neural networks, leading to a better understanding of how neural activity underlies behavior and other brain functions, MIT engineers have invented a new microscope that can image electrical activity in neurons distributed across the brain of an entire organism, the experimental model Danio rerio (zebrafish).

Using a microscope that they adapted for fast, high-volumetric rate imaging, the researchers were able to track electrical activity across the brain on the scale of milliseconds. This method revealed patterns of neural activity from neurons throughout the brain that were activated in response to ultraviolet light.

“All of the parts of the brain are connected together, so if you want to truly understand the brain, you have to understand how all the neurons work together as an emergent whole,” says Ed Boyden, the Y. Eva Tan Professor in Neurotechnology at MIT; a professor of biological engineering, media arts and sciences, and brain and cognitive sciences; and a member of MIT’s McGovern Institute for Brain Research, Yang Tan Collective, and the Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research.

Boyden is the senior author of the study, which appears today in Nature Methods. Former J. Douglas Tan Postdoctoral Fellow Zeguan Wang PhD ’24 and former MIT research scientist Jie Zhang are the lead authors of the paper. Other authors include former MIT postdoc Panagiotis Symvoulidis, Picower Institute research scientist Wei Guo, graduate students Davy Deng and Lige Zhang, Koch Institute research scientist Adam Amsterdam, Picower Institute research scientist Takato Honda, Boston College undergraduate Steven Roche, and Matthew Wilson, the Sherman Fairchild Professor of Neuroscience at MIT and a member of the Picower Institute.

High-speed imaging

One technique often used to measure neuron activity in the brain is calcium imaging. Calcium flows into neurons after they fire an electrical impulse, so measuring calcium levels in the cells can serve as a proxy for neural activity. However, this type of imaging isn’t fast enough to capture single spikes of activity.

“Calcium imaging inherently is very slow, so you’re talking about imaging activity on the order of seconds or even minutes. Typically that is too slow for us to be able to see a lot of these high-speed neural activities,” Zhang says. “Neurons compute using electrical activity, so with voltage imaging, you can get direct observation of that.” 

To enable direct imaging of voltage, researchers have developed proteins called genetically encoded voltage indicators — fluorescent proteins that can be genetically expressed in neurons. When a neuron fires an impulse, the protein fluoresces, which can be detected with a fluorescence microscope.

In previous work, researchers have used these proteins to image small populations of neurons, usually focusing on one localized part of the brain. Until now, there hasn’t been a way to image a large volume, such as the entire brain, with the millisecond-scale resolution needed to see electrical impulses from individual neurons.

To achieve that, the MIT team decided to modify a commonly used microscope known as a light sheet microscope. This type of microscope uses a sheet of laser light to illuminate a thin slice of a sample. By imaging many layers in sequence, this technique can generate 3D images of a large volume. However, with previous microscopes, the scanning of an entire volume would take too long to be able to capture neuronal impulses across the volume at single cell resolution. 

“Different groups of neurons that are distributed across the brain coordinate together at millisecond timescales to generate a lot of behaviors and brain computations,” Wang says. “To understand the principles, we need the technology to observe their activity at the same time, across the whole brain, so we are not missing any important participant neurons.”

To make the imaging process fast enough to image millisecond-scale activity, the researchers increased the image acquisition speed of the microscope’s camera, and they also boosted the scanning speed of the microscope using a technique called remote refocusing.

Using this approach, the researchers showed that they could scan the entire zebrafish brain 200 times per second, or once every five milliseconds. 

Mapping brain activity

To test the new microscope, the researchers engineered neurons in larval zebrafish to express a voltage indicator called Positron2-Kv. Although they had hoped that the indicator would end up in every neuron, it produced signals in neurons distributed throughout the brain, with about one quarter of the neurons exhibiting acceptable signals. This was enough, however, to observe patterns of activity across the brain. The researchers imaged the brain as the fish were resting, and they were able to observe single voltage spikes from neurons, as well as rapid bursts of spikes.

Additionally, this technique revealed patterns in how the brain is activated following a stimulus such as ultraviolet light. Immediately following the stimulus, activity was seen in the optic tectum, which receives and processes visual input from the retina. This activity propagated from one side of a part of the brain called the tectum to the other. Stimulus-independent activity also occurred in sequences across sets of neurons in the cerebellum and hindbrain.

The researchers now hope to increase the percentage of neurons that they can image across the brain, as well as the microscope’s speed and resolution. They are also working on expanding the use of this technique to other experimental models, including mice.

This approach, they say, could offer neuroscientists a new way to generate hypotheses about what happens in the brain when it engages in specific behaviors, or about how brain activity is linked to states of mind such as daydreaming.

“A big question is simply to understand how neurons work together as a network. And this might be the first time that you could do that, because you can image the voltage of neurons distributed throughout the network,” Boyden says.

The research was funded by the National Institutes of Health, the BRAIN Initiative, the Picower Institute Innovation Fund, K. Lisa Yang, Ashar Aziz, the K. Lisa Yang and Hock E. Tan Center for Molecular Therapeutics in Neuroscience at MIT, the Hock E. Tan and K. Lisa Yang Center for Autism Research, the Alana Down Syndrome Center, John Doerr, Jed McCaleb, James Fickel, and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.

Nature Climate Change, Published online: 14 August 2026; doi:10.1038/s41558-026-02691-0

Although many cities have set net-zero targets, there is limited understanding of their residual emissions strategies. An analysis of 103 European cities reveals best practices but also a potential over-reliance on temporary land-based carbon removal and the limited robustness of compensation strategies.

Flock Safety, the embattled vendor of mass surveillance technology, has rolled out a handful of new reforms intended to appease the justified nationwide anger that has seen scores of towns cancel or suspend their contracts with the company for automated license plate readers (ALPRs). The reforms are a combination of long overdue changes along with some cosmetic fixes that fail to address the fundamental dangers of this technology.  

We should not be letting companies decide how much privacy we deserve.

So, what do these reforms actually do?  

The most consequential is Flock’s default setting of an optional 7-day retention period for ALPR data, down from its original default optional 30-day retention period. This means if police want to retain data beyond the duration of their retention setting, they need to access “Evidence Mode,” i.e., when the desired data is associated with an active investigation and not just a fishing expedition. This is significant because, in at least some circumstances, Flock has previously charged its customers to extend their retention period. So, while towns can likely easily flip the switch to longer retention periods, it might come with a price tag some cities will be unwilling to pay.  

Flock also has two other, likely easier-to-bypass reforms. The first is offense filtering so that cities can enable other departments to access their ALPR data only if they are investigating certain crimes, e.g., murder or robbery but not immigration-related investigations. The second is supposedly beefing up their audit feature and proactively locking out officers who file suspicious requests for data. The major problem here is the fact that Flock’s enhanced audit and transparency tools help to address a problem that Flock itself has created—an abusable mass surveillance system that tracks all cars all the time.  

In addition to these reforms, there is also a tone shift coming from Flock’s CEO, Garrett Langley. Langley went from calling the DeFlock movement “terrorists” (which he has since apologized for) and saying that the wave of anti-surveillance anger was more about the current federal administration than it was specifically about his company, to a more conciliatory tone that acknowledges some of the problems of dangerous surveillance, mission creep, and police abuse.  Just look at this report from the BBC:  

“Historically, my point of view as a chief executive of a private company was, I don't know if I should be making these decisions. I don't know if it's my job to say how long data should be retained,” Langley said. 

He added that he has come to agree with groups like the American Civil Liberties Union and the Electronic Frontier Foundation that police should need an active case number to search Flock's data. 

“They're right. I think it should be required.” 

To be clear, our position has long been that police, at a minimum, need to get a warrant, signed by a judge, in order to search for historic ALPR data regarding specific vehicles. For us, it’s common sense: if police want to dip into historic ALPR data like they were going back in time to retroactively follow your comings and goings, they need a warrant.  

Fundamentally, these reforms leave us wondering: what is stopping Flock from reversing course on them if their law enforcement customers respond by defecting to another ALPR vendor? Nothing.  

This all leads to the bigger and more important issue: We should not be letting companies decide how much privacy we deserve. If our privacy is determined by how much surveillance technology vendors decide is too much surveillance, then we’re really out of luck. It shouldn’t be up Flock or any other ALPR vendor to decide how long police can collect and retain data on millions, if not hundreds of millions, of innocent people. We need lawmakers to step up and pass laws that restrict police’s use of surveillance technology. After all, the surveillance business model is the problem, and a few company-imposed slapdash reforms aren’t going to change that.

Related Cases: SIREN and CAIR-CA v. San Jose

This essay was written with Nathan E. Sanders, and originally appeared in Tech Policy Press.

AI represents the first time we humans can do cognitive work outside of our bodies at scale. The only comparable moment is the early years of the industrial revolution, when new technologies like the steam engine provided a quantum leap in our ability to do mechanical work outside of our bodies at scale. If AI’s cognitive capabilities become integrated into our lives, businesses, and governments—a process that will take years if not decades—society will be as unrecognizable as the modern world would be to a preindustrial farmer. And yet, Americans—by a wide margin—...

Property insurers show “where their loyalties lie” in urging court to block climate lawsuits against oil and gas industry, environmentalists say.

Exxon and other fossil fuel producers told a court Tuesday that a lawsuit by the island's towns should have been filed within four years of Hurricane Maria.

The Democratic front-runner in the governor’s race has raised doubts about the state’s ambitious climate goals.

Anthropic and OpenAI haven’t disclosed their greenhouse gas emissions, made net-zero pledges or published sustainability reports as they prepare for IPOs.

Somalia has faced repeated cycles of prolonged drought followed by destructive flooding, which have displaced communities and worsened food insecurity.

Renewable energy adoption remains limited among smaller steel companies despite India's clean power capacity tripling over the past decade.

The moment a nuclear reactor begins operation, a complex chain of events is initiated within the fuel: Heavy atoms split into fission products, knocking other atoms out of place and creating defects that can change how the fuel swells, transfers heat, and reacts chemically over time. 

Understanding those processes is key to understanding how safe and efficient a nuclear reactor will be. But even for some of the most-studied fuel types, the mechanisms controlling those processes are unclear.

Such is the case with a particular kind of metallic fuel, uranium alloyed with 10 percent zirconium by weight, also known as U-10Zr. This fuel was extensively tested in historic sodium-cooled fast reactors such as the Experimental Breeder Reactor-II (EBR-II) in Idaho and the Fast Flux Testing Facility (FFTF) in Washington state, helping establish the foundation for metallic fuel development in the U.S. Today, U-10Zr is again attracting attention for use in next-generation advanced reactors.

But most studies of U-10Zr took place decades ago, leaving unanswered questions about exactly how the fuel changes when it undergoes nuclear fission in a reactor and how it interacts with the protective fuel cladding surrounding it.

Now, together with Idaho National Laboratory (INL), MIT researchers have led one of the most detailed three-dimensional studies of irradiated U-10Zr to date. The researchers used a technique known as high energy synchrotron X-ray computed tomography at Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL) in New York to analyze the pore networks and chemical changes that formed under irradiation during use inside the FFTF reactor, providing new insights into how the material swells, transfers heat, and interacts with the fuel cladding. 

The findings could help keep some nuclear reactors running for longer, while also informing the next generation of nuclear reactor fuel systems.

“This study helps us model the pore distribution in the fuel more accurately,” says senior author Ericmoore Jossou, MIT’s John Clark Hardwick (1986) Professor of Nuclear Science and Engineering. “It also helps us design for the safe operation of metallic fuels in reactors by giving us a better understanding of the role of pores and their importance.”

Joining Jossou on the paper are first author and MIT postdoc Anthony Harrup; Riley Moeykens ’25, SM ’25; BNL researchers Michael Drakopoulos and Nghia Vo; and INL researchers Jana Howard, Colby Jensen, and Tiankai Yao.

Understanding nuclear fuel

A class of nuclear reactors known as sodium-cooled fast reactors generate energy from rods of metallic fuels that are sealed inside metal tubes called cladding. In each rod, heat generally moves outward from the center to the edge and then to the cladding, where liquid sodium carries heat away to be harvested into power.

“As you operate the reactor, the contact between the fuel and the cladding material creates chemical interactions that can be problematic,” explains Jossou. “There is a migration of materials from the fuel to the cladding, like fission gases and rare earth elements called lanthanides, which can react with the cladding, cause embrittlement, and damage the fuel system.”

Studies of previously irradiated fuel and its cladding have captured mostly two-dimensional snapshots, preventing scientists from seeing the full scale of the pore networks that influence heat transfer and transport materials like lanthanides. Previous studies also mainly focused on specific sections of the fuel system, such as the fuel center or the fuel cladding interface.

For their study, the MIT researchers used fuel samples from the Fast Flux Testing Facility reactor, a sodium-cooled fast neutron reactor located in Washington state that operated from 1982 to 1992.

The Idaho National Lab managed the samples and prepared the samples. The team studied the prepared samples using high-energy synchrotron X-ray tomography at the Brookhaven National Laboratory. The synchrotron generated high-energy X-rays that allowed the researchers to reconstruct the fuel’s internal pore networks in three dimensions, revealing how porosity, chemistry, and fuel-cladding interactions evolve across the fuel radius.

The researchers found porosity increased modestly from the center of the fuel toward the fuel edge, but pore density jumped by over two orders of magnitude at the fuel’s edge by the cladding. The researchers also characterized the size and shape of pores, finding small pores at the center that turn into larger pore networks pointing outward toward the edge.

“The pores are currently modeled as spheres; however, in reality they are more complex, especially when many pores merged together,” Harrup says. “That’s true from the center all the way to the cladding. It explains why the cladding reacts the way it does, and why we see cladding chemicals in the fuel.”

The pore networks toward the edge allow fission products and lanthanides to move but slow down heat transport, impacting the fuel’s performance and lifetime. The researchers also mapped their microstructural findings with changes in the chemistry of the fuel in different areas.

“With this study, we’ve conducted an in-depth analysis enabled by advanced computational imaging methods that has never been done before, with correlations between local chemical environments and the formation of pores,” Harrup says. “It turns out that whether the environment is uranium rich or zirconium rich impacts the morphology and the channels of the pores. That has never been reported before.”

“The ability to directly visualize pore connectivity and fuel cladding interaction in three dimensions gives us important insight for improving fuel performance for advanced metallic fuel for sodium fast reactors,” says Tiankai Yao of INL.

Informing reactor designs

The experimental findings differed from some models of how pores form and how the fuel system swells, which could improve simulations to help keep reactors running for longer. They also give a more nuanced picture of how pores influence reactor performance and safety.

“This helps optimize the current metallic fuel proposed for sodium fast reactors,” Jossou says. “Now, together with INL, we better understand how pores are influencing the thermal performance of metallic fuel in reactors. At high temperature, the pores are not all bad, because we found they act as pathways for liquid sodium metal to flow through the fuel and sustain thermal conductivity. Connected pores could also serve as releasing channels for fission gases which reduce the internal fuel matrix stress.”

The findings could also be used to design better fuel systems for next generation of sodium fast reactors.

“This excellent piece of work generated by Professor Jossou’s group in collaboration with INL and BNL has elegantly combined the strength of attenuation-based X-ray tomography and focused ion beam lift-outs and produced valuable insights to the location-specific 3D porosity distribution in neutron-irradiated U-10Zr fuel,” says Dong Liu, a professor at Oxford University who was not associated with this work. “What is also impressive is that they correlated 3D porosity to the thermal properties of the fuels: The total volume fraction is not the only parameter that is important, the 3D topology also matters. This is extremely informative for the study of other types of porous nuclear materials.”

The work was supported by the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Nuclear Energy and utilized resources at BNL and INL. The sample preparation was carried out at INL, which is part of the Nuclear Science User Facilities, through a Rapid Turnaround Award.

Nature Climate Change, Published online: 13 August 2026; doi:10.1038/s41558-026-02730-w

Climate change is expected to alter oceanic circulation, with the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) at risk of collapse. This work shows that the stability of the AMOC is dependent on the rate of atmospheric CO2 change rather than having a fixed threshold.

A new short film spotlights the life and career of MIT Institute Professor and School of Engineering Dean Paula Hammond ’84, PhD ’93.

The documentary, “Full Circle: Paula Hammond at MIT,” traces Hammond’s path from childhood in Detroit, Michigan, to her arrival at MIT at 16 years old, to her evolution into a pioneering researcher in nanotechnology and ovarian cancer, as well as a leader at the Institute and around the globe.

The film is one of the debut offerings within “MIT Stories,” a new documentary series on MIT Learn that spotlights the innovators and changemakers whose work extends far beyond campus walls. Produced through intimate storytelling by MIT Open Learning’s Emmy Award-winning video team, the series aims to explore the passions that spark global impact and the human stories behind innovation.

“Everything Paula Hammond does is grounded in a deeply personal sense of purpose,” says Lana Scott, assistant media development director at MIT Open Learning who produced the film with Nick Vandenberg. “As a pioneering researcher and the first woman to lead MIT’s School of Engineering, she didn’t just break barriers, she changed what leadership can look like in a field that hasn’t always made space for people like her. Her story blends curiosity, care, and conviction, turning complex science into something human, relatable, and genuinely cinematic.”

The film’s original score was composed by Vandenberg, who was inspired by a musician Hammond has long cherished.

“Before our second interview, Paula and I spoke about our shared love of jazz, including artists like Charlie Parker and Miles Davis,” says Vandenberg, a videographer and senior editor at MIT Open Learning. “She mentioned Ramsey Lewis as a particular favorite of hers. So, as a little Easter egg for her, I wrote and recorded a composition with upright bass, drums, and organ based loosely on the sound of his early trio recordings.”

Video by Lana Scott and Nick Vandenberg / MIT Open Learning | 8 minutes, 40 seconds

The National Science Foundation (NSF) has selected MIT to establish and lead a new Materials Research Science and Engineering Center (MRSEC) focused on materials technologies for medical imaging, sustainable metals production, and next-generation semiconductors, according to an NSF announcement released July 30.

Expected to provide $18 million in research funding over six years, the award brings together 16 research groups from nine departments across four institutions, including five MIT departments, three collaborating universities, and a teaching hospital. The award is pending MIT’s negotiation of a formal research agreement with the NSF.

The MIT Materials Research Science and Engineering Center will be directed by Associate Professor Rafael Jaramillo of the Department of Materials Science and Engineering (DMSE), with Professor Caroline Ross of DMSE serving as associate director. The center will be housed administratively within the MIT Materials Research Laboratory.

The center will have two main research thrusts. One will engineer specialized materials to advance X-ray detectors used in medical imaging, potentially leading to better cancer diagnosis, lower radiation exposure, and improved industrial and security imaging. The other will explore high-temperature sulfur-based molten materials to transform how metals and semiconductors are made, opening a path to more efficient metal production, improved access to critical materials, and new thin-film semiconductor technologies. 

The expected funding will also support a new shared laboratory for testing magnetic materials and materials under extreme conditions, managed by MIT.nano. This facility will be available to academic and industry users, expanding the nationwide portfolio of NSF-supported research facilities. 

“The long-term goal is for the broader materials and engineering community to see the disruptive potential of bringing researchers together across disciplines to solve complex challenges,” says Jaramillo, the Stavros V. Salapatas Career Development Professor of Materials Science and Engineering. “And that includes specifically in medical diagnostics and metals production, where entirely new things will be possible that aren’t considered possible today.”

A legacy of collaboration

The selection of MIT’s MRSEC is part of a $108 million NSF investment in six research centers that will explore a range of topics, including artificial intelligence-driven experimental laboratories and hybrid quantum materials that combine light and matter. NSF’s MRSEC program brings together interdisciplinary teams of researchers to push the boundaries of materials science and engineering and tackle complex scientific challenges.

The MIT center builds on nearly 60 years of interdisciplinary materials research at the Institute, extending a legacy that began with U.S. Department of Defense-supported laboratories in the 1960s and continued through NSF-funded centers in subsequent decades. Past MRSEC investments helped build research communities that enabled MIT centers of excellence such as the MIT Microphotonics Center and the Microsystems Technology Laboratories.

“We were inspired to continue that legacy of collaborative research in materials science,” Jaramillo says. “It’s mainly the mode of working — the mode of working in a very intentional way as a team across disciplinary boundaries and having this program that brings people together.”

MIT departments involved in the MRSEC include DMSE; Chemistry; Chemical Engineering; Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences (EAPS); and Physics. Collaborating institutions identified in the MRSEC proposal are Yale University, the University of California at Santa Barbara, and the Department of Radiology at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School. 

The first research group will focus on re-engineering scintillators — materials that convert X-rays into visible light — at the nanoscale, with the goal of improving resolution, speed, and energy sensitivity.

“My vision for that is really Marin and JJ’s vision. So I'm basically cheerleading for them,” Jaramillo says, referring to optical materials experts Professor Marin Soljačić of Physics and Professor Juejun Hu of DMSE, who are expected to lead the effort.

The second group is closer to Jaramillo’s own research in semiconductor and advanced electronic materials. It seeks to develop a deeper understanding of high-temperature sulfur-based liquids to improve the yield and efficiency of producing critical metals such as copper. Expertise in these types of materials has become increasingly rare in U.S. academia, Jaramillo says, and one goal of the center is to rebuild that capability at MIT. “I’m very excited about that being a new intellectual center of gravity.”

Telling stories about materials

Beyond research, the center is also expected to develop outreach activities highlighting the importance of materials science in society, particularly in the Boston region, where Jaramillo said industries need more workers with backgrounds in materials processing.

“For example, our community colleges don’t offer it,” Jaramillo says. “If you were looking at a community college in Michigan, everyone would know what materials science is.”

One initiative, DISASTER! — “with all caps and an exclamation mark,” Jaramillo says — will tell stories of real-world catastrophes and the materials failures that contributed to them.

A major part of materials science over the last century has been understanding why things fail, Jaramillo says. “It’s also a tremendous foot in the door for introducing the field. Because frankly, ‘if it bleeds, it leads.’ If you have giant disasters, then suddenly people are like, ‘Why did the bridge fail?’”

The program will encourage MIT undergraduates to research and tell these stories, illustrating how forensic materials science has helped prevent future failures.

Among the examples Jaramillo cited are the rivets used to assemble the RMS Titanic, whose impurities made the rivets more brittle in the freezing North Atlantic, and the crashes of the world’s first commercial jetliner, the de Havilland Comet, which revealed the dangers of metal fatigue.

“There are so many other stories that need to be told around how a material failed,” Jaramillo said. “It really cost people money and time and lives. And then through forensic materials science, we understood why it failed and we avoided future failures.”

The MRSEC team is planning to stage public outreach events at the MIT Future Fest.

Looking ahead six years, Jaramillo hopes the center will have become a self-sustaining hub for materials research. 

“I hope that we will have rebuilt the muscle memory to come together in an interdisciplinary way around materials science, and that it should have a bit of a self-sustaining element to it. I hope that we then compete successfully for the next center, and lay the groundwork for the next 60 years.”

MIT Research Administration Services supported the MRSEC proposal development through its Research Development team, which specializes in providing substantive assistance for large and complex research proposals, and in supporting early-career faculty.

MIT faculty expected to be involved in the MRSEC are Rafael Jaramillo, Caroline Ross, Juejun Hu, and Antoine Allanore of DMSE; Moungi Bawendi of Chemistry; Martin Bazant of Chemical Engineering; Nicole Nie and Shuhei Ono of EAPS; and Marin Soljačić, Riccardo Comin, Nuh Gedik, and Long Ju of Physics.

Astronomers at MIT and elsewhere have spotted an extremely bright red spot in the early universe. The object resembles an enormous star, spanning the size of our solar system. But it also is putting out 100 billion times more energy than any known star can physically produce. In fact, such energies are closer to what a black hole might generate.

The curious combination suggests that the red spot is an entirely new type of astrophysical source. The astronomers are calling it a “black hole star.”

In a paper appearing today in the journal Nature, the team presents their analysis of the new object, which they discovered using NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). The telescope spotted the bright red dot in the very early universe, just a few hundred million years after the Big Bang.

The scientists conclude that the most likely explanation for the strange red dot is that it is a mashup of a black hole and a star — a combination that has never been observed until now. The object is likely a hugely dense cloud of gas, powered not by standard nuclear fusion, but by a central black hole.

“Our picture of this object is evolving very rapidly,” says lead author Rohan Naidu, a NASA Hubble Fellow and Pappalardo Fellow at MIT’s Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research (MKI). “We think there is a central black hole that is 100,000 times as massive as the sun. And around this black hole, there would be this very extended envelope of gas that looks like a star the size of the solar system. It’s huge.”

If the bright red dot is indeed a black hole star, it would help to solve the identity of other mysterious “little red dots” that have appeared in nearly every deep space image JWST has taken to date.

“These little red dots seem to be everywhere in the early universe but essentially disappear by the present day,” Naidu says. “What exactly these objects are has been one of the most debated topics of the JWST era.”

The study’s MIT co-authors are MKI Director Robert Simcoe, the Bruno B. Rossi Professor of Experimental Physics; and Wendy Sun ’26, along with collaborators from multiple other institutions.

A singular source

Naidu and his colleagues didn’t intend to find a black hole star. They were looking for the most distant, earliest galaxies, as part of a survey that they named “Mirage or Miracle” (MoM). The team used the JWST to look into deep space, back when the universe was a few hundred million years old. Their goal was to look for galaxies that actually formed at those early times.

“There’s been this puzzle of many bright galaxies showing up at extremely early times,” Naidu says. “What we found was that what looks like an extremely bright early galaxy, aka a ‘miracle,’ in some cases actually could be a ‘mirage.’”

As they looked through JWST’s images for intriguing sources to target with their survey, they noticed a feature that stood out from the rest: a dot that was very red, and very bright.

“When we see something very red in the universe, we often assume that it is surrounded by dust, like soot or ash,” Simcoe explains. “The same way that the wildfire smoke from Canada recently made the sky in Boston look bright red, astronomical objects can also appear redder than their intrinsic color when you see them through a veil of dust.”

But there were other signatures in the light that didn’t quite match up with what physicists expect from dust. The team also observed another strange pattern: The dot’s light was extremely bright, except below certain wavelengths, where the light completely disappeared. 

This spectral drop-off is known as a “Balmer break” — a signature traditionally associated with dense gas soaking up photons in the atmospheres of stars that are a few hundred millions of years old. Vega, one of the brightest stars in the night sky shows exactly this pattern. 

“The break we observed in this object is the deepest break we have ever observed in any object, ruling out ‘ordinary’ stars as the source,” Naidu says. “But it made us wonder if we were seeing a new kind of ‘stellar atmosphere,’ but on a spectacular scale.” 

What’s more, the red dot’s light contained almost no signature of metals or any elements other than hydrogen and helium. “It was truly singular in so many ways,” Naidu says.

Pure light

To puzzle out what the source of the red dot could be, the team ran simulations of different scenarios to see what combination of astrophysical features could produce the red dot’s distinctive color.

“We started to ask: Could you make something that red using just hydrogen, without any dust?” Simcoe says. “To our surprise, it turns out you can, if you have an extremely dense screen of hydrogen, so dense that it looks more like the surface of an enormous star than a wispy interstellar nebula.”

Their simulations pointed to the red dot possibly being some powerful enshrouded energy source, surrounded by an extremely dense cocoon of hydrogen. If this were the case, it would explain the light-blocking Balmer break and the lack of anything other than hydrogen and helium that the astronomers observed. But it still wouldn’t explain the object’s extreme brightness.

“You have something that looks a bit like a star but is 100 billion times brighter,” Naidu says. “That means you can’t be powering this by nuclear fusion, which is the energy source that sits at the heart of all the stars we have.”

Black holes, however, routinely produce energy at the scales the team observed. Naidu and his colleagues incorporated an active, accreting black hole into their simulations of the hydrogen-cocooned star and varied the black hole’s mass, along with other parameters. They then compared the resulting brightness of the simulated “black hole star” with the brightness that JWST observed from the red dot.

From these simulations, they found the closest match, and concluded that the most likely scenario to explain the red dot, is a black hole star. Specifically, the object likely contains a central black hole that is about 100,000 times as massive as the sun. This powerful core is surrounded by a dense, star-like cocoon of hydrogen that is roughly the size of the solar system.

The team has named the object MoM-BH*-1, after the survey that detected it, as well as the moniker “black hole star – one,” which implies that the object is the first of others. The researchers suspect that black hole stars could explain many of the other little red dots that appear in JWST images. Those objects are not as bright as MoM-BH*-1. 

“Every little red dot is consistent with being a black hole star, embedded in a generic early galaxy,” Naidu says. “But what is special about MoM-BH*-1 is, the black hole star is essentially completely outshining its surrounding host galaxy, such that we’re seeing pure black hole star light.”

This research was supported, in part, by the MIT Department of Physics, NASA, and the Space Telescope Science Institute.

The agency's former CFO is trying to determine if federal officials provided Loomer with information about her termination.