Black Hole Stars: "Little Red Dots" (LRDs) - Birth of Supermassive Black Holes?

I was intrigued to read this report in the Guardian: https://www.theguardian.com/science/2026/aug/12/astronomy-discovery-new-cosmic-object-black-hole-star

The Nature paper on which this is based is here: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-026-10846-4

It seems there are a lot of these mysterious LRDs in deep space images taken by the James Webb telescope. Now a team has made a detailed spectroscopic analysis of one of these, at a redshift corresponding to 660m yrs after the Big Bang, so very early in the life of the cosmos. Apparently the red comes from (redshifted) Balmer emission of hydrogen, which has a very sharp cutoff, known as the Balmer Break or Balmer Jump. This I gather occurs at the ionisation limit of the Balmer series (transitions to or from the n=2 shell to higher quantum levels).

I had not heard of this before, but I suppose it makes sense that while atoms in high excited states can drop down to n=2 to give a series of emission lines, once the atom is ionised, recombination of the ion with a free electron (of varying kinetic energy) can occur at any energy so the intensity at any given wavelength will be far lower, hence the Balmer break. This Balmer break seems to be a standard effect seen in the spectra of stars, but what is unusual in this case is that it is so pronounced. It also seems to be accompanied in the spectral signature of this object by Hβ (n=2 <->3 and and Hγ (n=2<->4) lines in absorption, i.e. there is gas in front of the emitter that must be already in the n=2 1st excited state.

All this they say is consistent with a black hole at the centre of a hydrogen cloud hot and dense enough to populate the n=2 atomic level. They speculate that this and the other LRDs may be black holes in the early universe in a stage of rapid growth, ingesting gas clouds. They call these objects black hole stars, because of their emission. They would seem to be a new type of astronomical object.

At least, that is my imperfect understanding of it. Corrections and comments welcome.