Nasa telescope might have spotted ‘dark stars’ which could answer huge space riddle
Three bright objects spotted in the night sky by the James Webb space telescope could answer one of the biggest unsolved problems in physics.
Researchers at the University of Texas at Austin believe that the three objects might be “dark stars”, theoretical objects much bigger and brighter than our sun, powered by particles of dark matter annihilating.
Dark stars could theoretically grow to be several million times the mass of our sun and up to 10 billion times as bright as the sun - and the three objects were initially identified as being entire galaxies.
The three candidate dark stars (JADES-GS-z13-0, JADES-GS-z12-0, and JADES-GS-z11-0) were originally identified as galaxies in December 2022 by the JWST Advanced Deep Extragalactic Survey (JADES).
Using spectroscopic analysis, the JADES team confirmed the objects were observed at times ranging from about 320 million to 400 million years after the Big Bang, making them some of the earliest objects ever seen.
Read more: Mysterious “rogue planet” could be even weirder than we thought
Katherine Freese, at The University of Texas at Austin says, “Discovering a new type of star is pretty interesting all by itself, but discovering it’s dark matter that’s powering this—that would be huge.”
“When we look at the James Webb data, there are two competing possibilities for these objects.
“One is that they are galaxies containing millions of ordinary, population-III stars. The other is that they are dark stars. And believe it or not, one dark star has enough light to compete with an entire galaxy of stars.”
Although dark matter makes up about 25% of the universe, its nature has eluded scientists.
Read more: Astronomers find closest black hole to Earth
Scientists believe it consists of a new type of elementary particle, and are hunting to detect evidence of such particles.
Among the leading candidates are Weakly Interacting Massive Particles.
When they collide, these particles annihilate themselves, depositing heat into collapsing clouds of hydrogen and converting them into brightly shining dark stars.
The identification of supermassive dark stars would open up the possibility of learning about dark matter.
Follow-up observations from the James Webb Space Telescope of the objects’ spectroscopic properties — including dips or excess of light intensity in certain frequency bands — could help confirm whether these candidate objects are indeed dark stars.
Confirming the existence of dark stars might also help solve a problem created by James Webb Space Telescope: there seem to be too many large galaxies too early in the universe to fit the predictions of the standard model of cosmology.
Freese said, “It’s more likely that something within the standard model needs tuning, because proposing something entirely new, as we did, is always less probable.
““But if some of these objects that look like early galaxies are actually dark stars, the simulations of galaxy formation agree better with observations.”
Watch: Five jaw-dropping shots from the James Webb Space Telescope's first year
