New York: Data from NASA’s James Webb Telescope has caught a glimpse of the possible first ‘dark stars’. Dark matter-powered stars still need to be proven but they could hold clues about the nature of one of the great mysteries of the universe. A team of three astrophysicists – in collaboration with Katherine Freese at the University of Texas at Austin, Cosmin Ili at Colgate University and Jillian Palin ’23 – analyzed James Webb’s images
They found three bright objects that may be “dark stars,” theoretical objects much larger and more luminous than our Sun, powered by dark matter annihilation particles. The study, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, says that if confirmed, dark stars could reveal the nature of dark matter, one of physics’ most deeply unsolved problems.
“Discovering a new type of star is very interesting in itself, but it’s dark matter that’s powering it — that would be a huge deal,” said Freese, director of the Weinberg Institute for Theoretical Physics.
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Although dark matter makes up about 25 percent of the universe, its nature remains beyond scientists’ understanding. Scientists believe it contains a new type of elementary particle and the search is on to detect such particles.
The three candidate dark stars were originally identified as galaxies by the JWST Advanced Deep Extragalactic Survey (JADES) in December 2022.
Using spectroscopic analysis, the JADES team confirmed that the objects were observed around 320 million to 400 million years after the Big Bang, making them some of the earliest objects ever observed.
Dark stars can theoretically be several million times the mass of our Sun and up to 10 billion times more luminous than the Sun. “We predicted in 2012 that supermassive dark stars could be observed with the JWST,” said Assistant Professor Ili.