James Webb telescope catches glimpse of possible first-ever 'dark stars'
Stars beam brightly out of the darkness of space thanks to fusion, atoms melding together and releasing energy. But what if there’s another way to power a star?
A team of astrophysicists analyzed images from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) and found three bright objects that might be “dark stars,” which are theoretical objects much bigger and brighter than our sun.
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.
The idea for dark stars originated when Freese asked: What does dark matter do to the first stars to form in the universe?
If confirmed, dark stars could reveal the nature of dark matter — one of the deepest unsolved problems in all of physics.
Dark matter possibly could be brown dwarfs, "failed" stars that never ignited because they lacked the mass needed to start burning, according to NASA.
"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," said Freese, the director of the Weinberg Institute for Theoretical Physics and the Jeff and Gail Kodosky endowed chair in physics at the University of Texas in Austin.
Although dark matter makes up about 25% of the universe, its nature has eluded scientists.
The identification of supermassive dark stars would open up the possibility of learning about the dark matter based on their observed properties.
Confirming the existence of dark stars might also help solve a problem created by JWST: There seem to be too many large galaxies too early in the universe to fit the predictions of the standard model of cosmology.
"But if some of these objects that look like early galaxies are actually dark stars, the simulations of galaxy formation agree better with observations," Freese said.
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). 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.
Freese said there are two competing possibilities for these objects: The galaxies contain millions of stars or they are dark stars.
"And believe it or not, one dark star has enough light to compete with an entire galaxy of stars," Freese said.
