Institute for Advanced Study / Princeton University Joint Astrophysics Colloquium

Perhaps the most stunning surprise revealed by JWST yet is a class of compact, red, high-redshift sources (z~2-9) found in virtually every image the telescope takes. The sheer numbers of these ``Little Red Dots" demand that any satisfying theory of the early Universe address their nature. In this talk I will summarize three years of relentless community effort that have shown traditional models of galaxies and AGN fall dramatically short when confronted by the Little Red Dots. Instead, several lines of evidence point to a novel astrophysical phenomenon,``black hole stars" (BH*s) -- black holes enveloped in dense gas that radiate in a manner reminiscent of stellar phenomena. I will outline how unraveling the physics and origins of BH*s might require ``renaissance astronomy", combining insights from the study of transients, stars, globular clusters, Galactic archeology, and the most distant galaxies. I will discuss why BH*s appear to be a long-sought missing chapter in the origin story of almost every massive black hole.