Inside almost every known galaxy lurks a supermassive black hole, and our home Milky Way galaxy is no exception. Located about 26,000 light-years from Earth, Sagittarius A* anchors millions of stars and their planets with its incomprehensibly gargantuan gravitational pull.

Astronomers may have discovered a bizarre new type of star with a black hole at its center.

At the center of the Milky Way, an otherwise ordinary star is moving at an extraordinary speed. Every 8.7 years, the faint star S301 dives toward Sagittarius A*, the supermassive black hole at the heart of our galaxy.

Researchers have named their discovery MoM-BH*-1, which references the survey that found it, its new classification, and what will likely be the first of more black hole stars to come. Many other red dots lurking in JWST models may soon be explained by the new astrophysical model, although none detected so far are nearly as bright as MoM-BH*-1.

Astronomers using the James Webb Space Telescope have discovered a bizarre object from just a few hundred million years after the Big Bang that looks like an enormous star but shines far too brightly to actually be one.

“This is the first evidence of three active black holes in a single galaxy in the distant universe,” Hannah Übler, an astronomer at the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics and lead author of the new Astronomy & Astrophysics study, said in a Max Planck Institute press release.

A telescope has spied the fastest known star in our galaxy, racing around the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way. The star is zipping around the black hole, reaching speeds of about 15,

Astronomers detected a black hole displaced nearly a kiloparsec from the center of a dwarf galaxy 230 million light-years away. Unlike most, it is actively feeding and producing radio jets, making it one of the most convincing off-nuclear cases ever confirmed. The discovery reveals that black holes can grow and shape galaxies even when not in the core, reshaping theories of cosmic evolution.