They are 3 “legendary” objects shining 10 billion times brighter than the Sun, made of dark matter, and may have “gone extinct” billions of years ago while sending 4 ghosts to Earth.
For a long time, scientists have proposed 2 hypotheses about the first generation of stars in the universe that have not been observed by any instruments:
- One is “Population III stars” that burn hydrogen;
- Two are “dark stars” made of hydrogen and helium but powered by heating dark matter instead of nuclear fusion like the Sun.
One of these types of stars may have just been captured by the “monster” James Webb, according to Sci-News.
Close-up portrait of a dark star – (Photo: SCI-NEWS).
James Webb is a super telescope developed and primarily operated by NASA, with support from ESA and CSA (the space agencies of Europe and Canada), boasting a reach of billions of light-years.
The light from these objects also takes billions of years to reach the “eye” of the telescope, making this instrument a time-traveling tool into the ancient universe.
This time, it discovered 3 strange objects in the space-time region only 320-400 million years after the Big Bang that birthed the universe, approximately 13.4 billion light-years away from us.
These are JADES-GS-z13-0, JADES-GS-z12-0, and JADES-GS-z11-0, discovered from the James Webb Advanced Deep Galaxy Survey mission (JADES).
JADES-GS-z13-0, JADES-GS-z12-0, and JADES-GS-z11-0, with JADES-GS-z11-0 being duplicated due to the gravitational lensing effect created by nearby galaxies, capable of bending space-time – (Photo: NASA/ESA/CSA)
Dr. Kinda Freese, an astrophysicist from the University of Texas in Austin (USA) and a key member of the JADES team, stated that they were initially identified as early galaxies.
However, in-depth spectral analysis revealed otherwise. They are indeed 3 “legendary” dark stars.
Dark stars were mistaken for galaxies because they shine 10 billion times brighter than the Sun, appearing as bright as a normal galaxy made of regular stars. They are called dark stars because they are made of dark matter – invisible but potentially comprising 25%-80% of the universe, according to some studies.
Dark matter particles do not emit light, but when they collide inside the star and annihilate, the thermal energy transfers heat to the collapsing hydrogen clouds, producing a brightness surpassing that of normal stars powered by nuclear fusion.
Theoretically, dark stars are “monsters” strong enough to become supermassive black holes – also known as monster black holes – after they die.
Thus, these “ghosts” from the past will help resolve the longstanding mystery of why the early universe had so many enormous black holes and many structures resembling large galaxies.
Previously, it was believed that this was unreasonable since large galaxies with supermassive black holes at their centers, like our Milky Way, would require a considerable amount of time to merge from smaller galaxies.
