The James Webb Space Telescope has already made some astonishing discoveries in its first year of scientific operations, but if confirmed, there is one discovery that would be the most significant of all time.
A team of astrophysicists proposes that three bright objects detected by Webb in the distant universe could be the first candidates for “dark stars,” hypothetical celestial objects fueled by the annihilation of dark matter.
The unprecedented power of the James Webb allows astronomers to look further into space and further back in time than any previous telescope, but in doing so, it continues to discover things that disrupt our understanding of the cosmos.
A mass of 10 million suns and the brightness of 10,000
In a new study, astrophysicists propose an alternative: perhaps some of the objects we see in the early universe are not galaxies, but “dark stars.”
More than an oxymoron or a cult science fiction film from the 70s, a dark star is a hypothetical object that does not shine through nuclear fusion like regular stars, but generates heat from dark matter particles annihilating each other at its core.
If they exist, dark stars would be much larger than normal stars, with the mass of 10 million suns, and would emit the brightness of 10 billion suns, though not in visible light but in infrared.
They would also be 10,000 times wider, which means that if the Sun were a dark star, it would fill the entire solar system, with its outer surface located somewhere near the orbit of Pluto.
Models suggest that dark stars should be possible in the early universe, and in fact, they could help explain the mystery of why there seem to be so many large galaxies in the early universe.
Once the “fuel” of dark matter in their cores is depleted, the regular matter that makes up the majority of the star collapses into a black hole, which could potentially serve as the seed for supermassive black holes.
This could accelerate the process of galaxy formation. Other “too early” galaxies could simply be dark stars, as they would appear similar from this distance.
Of course, as fascinating as the idea is, this study is extremely speculative. Not only do we not know if dark stars exist, but we also don’t know if there is dark matter to power them.
Even in that case, dark matter would have to exist in a specific form among several proposed forms it could take. Occam’s razor is not on our side.
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