NASA’s groundbreaking James Webb Space Telescope has made a discovery that could potentially unravel one of the greatest mysteries of the universe. A team of astronomers from The University of Texas (UT) at Austin, using the telescope, has identified three potential “dark stars” that formed just 320 million years after the Big Bang. These early stars, captured in an image as fuzzy dots in the vast expanse of space, hold the key to uncovering the elusive dark matter.
According to the findings, dark stars could only exist if dark matter generates heat at their cores, preventing them from collapsing and causing them to expand. This aligns with the observations made by JWST. Despite dark matter accounting for around 85% of the universe’s mass, scientists have yet to fully understand its nature. The only evidence of its existence is its gravitational effect on visible matter.
If these recent findings are confirmed, dark stars could provide valuable insights into the nature of the nonluminous matter. The concept of dark stars has intrigued the scientific community ever since the UT team first proposed it in 2007. Now, in a study published in PNAS, the researchers are excited to announce that their hypothesis may indeed be correct.
The team believes that dark stars were the predominant type of stars in the early universe, consisting mostly of hydrogen and helium remnants from the Big Bang. Unlike modern stars, dark stars derive their energy from the heating effect of dark matter rather than nuclear fusion. These objects are characterized by their brightness, diffuse nature, and enormous mass, with the potential to reach up to ten million times the mass of our sun.
The three candidate dark stars, named JADES-GS-z13-0, JADES-GS-z12-0, and JADES-GS-z11-0, were observed in galaxies during the Advanced Deep Extragalactic Survey (JADES) with JWST in December 2022. Further analysis by the JADES team revealed that these stars formed approximately 320 to 400 million years after the Big Bang.
A recent study suggests that the Big Bang occurred 26.7 billion years ago, but the UT researchers’ findings are based on previous evidence indicating a 13.7 billion-year-old universe. Katherine Freese, an astrophysicist from UT, explains that when examining the data from the James Webb Telescope, two possibilities emerge: these objects could either be galaxies containing millions of ordinary population-III stars or they could be dark stars. Surprisingly, the light emitted by a single dark star could rival that of an entire galaxy of stars.
While the existence of dark matter has yet to be definitively proven, scientists theorize that it is composed of a new type of elementary particle, the smallest building blocks of the universe. The UT team proposes that these particles are Weakly Interacting Massive Particles (WIMPs), which neither emit nor absorb light and have minimal interactions with other particles. When these particles collide, they self-annihilate, releasing heat that transforms hydrogen clouds into luminous dark stars. Identifying supermassive dark stars would provide valuable insights into the properties of dark matter.
The concept of dark matter originated in 1933, initially referred to as “missing matter.” It arose from the realization that the combined mass of stars in the Coma galaxy cluster accounted for only a fraction of the mass required to maintain the cluster’s gravitational pull. Decades later, in the 1970s, astronomers Vera Rubin and Kent Ford made crucial observations of anomalies in stellar orbits within galaxies, leading to the widespread belief that these anomalies were caused by invisible masses of dark matter.
Through its remarkable observations, the James Webb Space Telescope has opened up new avenues of exploration and understanding, shedding light on the mysteries that pervade our universe. The discovery of these potential dark stars represents a significant milestone in our quest to comprehend the enigmatic nature of dark matter.
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