Although these three objects were originally identified as galaxies, they may actually be “dark stars.”
NASA/ESA
The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) may have discovered a strange star powered by dark matter rather than nuclear fusion. If these stars really exist, three big cosmic mysteries may be solved at once.
A normal star forms when a cloud of dust and gas grows so large that it collapses on itself, and the pressure and temperature in its core become high enough to initiate the process of nuclear fusion. In nuclear fusion, atoms collide and fuse into heavier elements. So-called dark stars will not fuse at all. In the early Universe, they may have formed from similar clouds rich in dark matter. In some hypothesized types of dark matter, when two particles collide, they should annihilate in a burst of energy, powerful enough to power a supermassive star.
“They are very strange stars – about 10 astronomical units in radius. [astronomical units, the distance between Earth and the sun]So they’re fluffy beasts, they don’t have cores.” Catherine Freeze at the University of Texas at Austin. “They’re relatively cold throughout, so cold that nothing prevents accretion on them, so they grow. They’re a million solar masses, a billion solar degrees, or It can grow beyond that.”
Freeze and her colleagues combed through data such as: The most distant objects observed by the JWST, three of which were found to be supermassive dark stars rather than galaxies as originally assumed. The JWST found galaxies much more distant than expected, which can be problematic for our standard cosmological model, so if some of them are actually faint stars, their The dilemma can be resolved.
“At the moment the spectra aren’t good enough. We’ll have to observe one of these objects with JWST for a year, but that’s unlikely,” says Freese. Another way he can figure it out is to find faint stars whose light is magnified by gravitational lensing. This may give you more information.
If these objects turn out to be dark stars, it will greatly advance our understanding of dark matter. “Despite decades of experimentation and observation, nothing related to the non-gravitational nature of dark matter has yet been conclusively observed,” he says. pearl sandick at the University of Utah. “Observing dark stars provides incredible confirmation that dark matter experiences forces other than gravity, and is a very interesting alternative to the standard story of the formation of the first stars in the universe. It would bear witness to a different situation.”
As dark stars drift out of their formed regions, there is not enough dark matter within them to act as fuel. “As soon as it moves, it collapses and booms. It’s a black hole,” Freeze says. In theory, however, dark stars can grow much larger than normal stars, so the resulting black hole would be similarly massive. This could answer the long-standing mystery of how supermassive black holes formed in the early universe.
topic:
