Huge suns powered by darkness may have been spotted at the dawn of time: ScienceAlert

Three objects spotted lurking in the darkness of the cosmic dawn could be powered by collisions between particles made not of ordinary stellar matter but of a mysterious material known as dark matter.

using data from James Webb Space Telescopea team of theoretical astrophysicists determined that three galaxies – called JADES-GS-z13-0, JADES-GS-z12-0 and JADES-GS-z11-0 – are consistent with what we might expect if we were looking at single, massive stars that It works by heating dark matter, rather than nuclear fusion.

According to Cosmin Ilie and Jillian Paulin of Colgate University and Katherine Freese of the University of Texas, Austin, this model can help us understand the nature of dark matter and explain the source of the universe’s abundance of supermassive black holes.

There are many gaps in our knowledge of the universe, and Dark Stars can address a number of them.

First, there is dark matter. We don’t know what dark matter is, but we do know that there is much more out there normal thing That make up pretty much everything we can see, from galaxies and black holes to ants and biscuits. We know this because we see its gravitational effects — as if there are just masses of, well, mass in there that we can’t see or detect any other way.

Another problem is that we didn’t actually see the first stars burning up in the universe. We’ve seen evidence of them, but not the stars themselves.

Then there are supermassive black holes, around which galaxies revolve. We don’t know how these objects – millions to billions of times the mass of the Sun – become so massive.

Finally, since it began operations in July of 2022, the JWST has located a large number of massive galaxies in the early universe. How these galaxies got so big in such a short time since the Big Bang is a mystery.

Dark stars provide an elegant solution. We know what ordinary stars They are: giant balls of mostly hydrogen and helium, with very hot, compressed nuclei where atoms smash together in Nuclear fusion It generates heat and light.

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According to Ellie and his colleagues, dark matter stars would be powered by dark matter annihilation instead. One of the theories of dark matter is that it is Self annihilation; When two particles of dark matter collide, they obliterate each other in a burst of heat and light.

There would have been a lot of dark matter in the early universe under this model. It would have created blobs within the mass range of a million suns, cauterizing itself in a furnace of radiant heat with the brightness of a billion suns and the brightness of a billion suns.

JADES-GS-z13-0, JADES-GS-z12-0, and JADES-GS-z11-0, seen in the first hundreds of millions of years after the Big Bang, fit the expected characteristics of Such things.

Over time, such stars will collapse into supermassive black holes, which explains why we don’t see them anymore — and why we see so many supermassive black holes.

They will also explain why the first generation of stars are not around, although stars as old as the universe itself can be found even here in our galaxy. If dark stars exist, they are first-generation stars We are Still about looks completely different.

It is very theoretical and not yet verified; May require more detailed notes. According to the team’s calculations, dark stars and early galaxies will have different helium signatures, and we can tell them apart by seeing these signatures. However, JWST is currently the most powerful space telescope ever built. Getting this information may require waiting for future telescopes.

Research published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.