Could the first stars in our universe be powered by dark matter?
The James Webb Space Telescope has revealed unexpectedly bright, early galaxies that defy our current models. New evidence suggests we might not be looking at clusters of ordinary stars, but at massive, luminous objects fueled by the self-annihilation of invisible dark matter.
For decades, astronomers believed the first stars were powered by nuclear fusion. However, recent observations from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) have identified four potential candidates for a different phenomenon: supermassive dark stars. Unlike our Sun, these colossal, puffy spheres of hydrogen and helium are supported against gravitational collapse by the energy released when dark matter particles, such as Weakly Interacting Massive Particles (WIMPs), collide and annihilate one another.
A study led by Cosmin Ilie of Colgate University suggests these objects could explain why JWST is seeing galaxies that appear much brighter and more regular than expected for such an early epoch. These dark stars could potentially be a billion times more luminous than the Sun and reach a million times its mass. One candidate even displays a specific helium absorption signature, which researchers described as a "smoking gun" in a study published in the journal PNAS on September 30.
The implications for cosmology are profound. If these dark stars existed, they could provide the seeds for the supermassive black holes that power the most distant quasars. The theory of dark stars was first proposed in 2008 by Katherine Freese, Doug Spolyar, and Paolo Gondolo, with further expansions in 2010. Identifying these objects at redshifts as high as 14—just roughly 300 million years after the Big Bang—could fundamentally rewrite our understanding of how the first structures in the universe formed.
Source: Did JWST Discover Dark Matter Stars?
