The James Webb Space Telescope may have discovered three examples of “dark stars” that have so far only been described in theory and that get their energy from dark matter. At least that’s the opinion of a research team from the University of Texas, Austin, who have now presented their discovery. If this were to be confirmed, it could also solve one of the biggest mysteries to emerge from the observations of the new space telescope. Many of the particularly early galaxies, which are discovered in too large numbers, would therefore be only incredibly bright, “puffy” stars and not entire galaxies.
Announcement
Gigantic, almost invisible and “fluffy” stars?
The existence of dark stars in the early universe has been suggested by, among others, the German-American astrophysicist Katherine Freese. Consequently, these would have appeared in the first phase of stellar evolution after the Big Bang and would have consisted mainly of hydrogen and helium. At the core of the protogalaxies, existing dark matter would have served as a heat source and they would have grown to massive proportions. They would mostly radiate in the infrared. So far, observations haven’t been able to confirm or disprove the theory, but the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) could be. Freese is also now part of the team that claims to have spotted the dark stars.
The group says there are three objects now identified, designated JADES-GS-z13-0, JADES-GS-z12-0 and JADES-GS-z11-0. After their discovery and confirmation that they were objects that existed only 320 to 400 million years after the Big Bang, they were obviously classified as galaxies. Believe it or not, Freese’s team is now writing that they could even be individual stars that could rival galaxies in terms of radiation intensity. In theory, the dark stars could have grown to be millions of times the mass of our Sun and shine more than 10 billion times as bright.
That the first stars in the history of the universe could be dark, Freese et al., postulated in a 2007 publication led by astrophysicist Paolo Gondolo. The largely invisible stars could therefore have been 400 to 200,000 times larger than our sun and derived their energy from the destruction of dark matter. At that time it was said that stars could live only for months, but also hundreds of millions or even billions of years. It’s even conceivable that they still exist, the team had written. They named “Dark Stars” after a song by US rock band the Grateful Dead.
It should now Claim presented in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences confirming the nature of the three objects may not only explain why the JWST seems to find many more galaxies in the early Universe than the theories suggest. The discovery of supermassive dark stars could also bring us much closer to answering the question of the nature of dark matter. This is one of the most important of fundamental physics. The fact that dark matter must exist comes from astronomical observations and the motions of stars, which cannot be adequately explained by known matter and its gravitation. Overall, there should be five times more dark matter in the cosmos than classical matter.
Announcement
(mho)
