It has electrically charged gases that generate areas of powerful magnetic forces. That knowledge could help scientists look for dark matter elsewhere in the universe, she says.The surface of the Sun is a very busy place. “Just having the information that is something that could annihilate would be really, really powerful,” says Tracy Slatyer, a theoretical physicist at MIT who was not involved in the study. If dark stars were to be found, though, “that would be revolutionary,” says study coauthor Cosmin Ilie, an astrophysicist at Colgate University in Hamilton, N.Y.ĭetecting dark stars would confirm the existence of a dark matter particle and hint at how it works ( SN: 7/7/22). And identifying any of the objects as a dark star would require that the simulated patterns fit well to more detailed spectra, says Brant Robertson, a theoretical astrophysicist at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Known types of stars could also create the observed light from the three candidates, says Sandro Tacchella, an astrophysicist at the University of Cambridge. JWST data from three of those objects are consistent with the simulated dark star patterns, Freese and colleagues report. They compared those spectra to light from images collected by JWST at different wavelengths for each of the four objects. The team ran computer simulations of how much light a hypothetical dark star might produce at various wavelengths. One of the candidates, JADES-GS-z13-0, is shown here (arrow). Three dark star candidates were identified from data collected by the JWST Advanced Deep Extragalactic Survey. But because they’re so far away, JWST can’t resolve them well enough to determine whether they’re actually galaxies or large, ultrabright stars, the researchers say. Those objects are currently thought to be small galaxies from the universe’s relative infancy. So Freese and colleagues zeroed in on four objects already confirmed to be highly redshifted, making them some of the oldest objects seen to date. Light from these remote objects is stretched, or redshifted, as the universe expands. In such images, JWST has so far discovered over 700 objects that may have originated in the first few hundred million years of the universe - the epoch when dark stars would have emerged ( SN: 12/16/22). To see if any dark stars are lurking in data from the orbiting observatory, Freese and colleagues pored over images from a JWST survey of early galaxies. They could also be millions of times as massive as the sun and shine billions of times brighter - bright enough, potentially, to be spotted by JWST. Theoretically, dark stars could be 10 times as wide as Earth’s orbit around the sun.
That heat would keep the cloud of hydrogen and helium from condensing into a dense, hot core like the stars that exist today.īecause the heat from dark matter annihilations would keep the gas cloud from condensing, dark stars could grow to gargantuan size. Though the true nature of dark matter isn’t known - its presence is inferred largely via its effect on how stars move within galaxies - it’s possible that dark matter particles can interact with themselves, annihilating each other when they collide and producing vast amounts of light and heat ( SN: 7/7/22). The hypothetical stars would have formed from clouds of hydrogen and helium that drew in locally abundant dark matter as they coalesced. Though dark stars have yet to be observed, they’re thought to be powered by heat from dark matter interactions rather than by nuclear fusion reactions like in the sun.ĭark stars “would be very weird looking,” says Freese, of the University of Texas at Austin. First proposed in 2007 by cosmologist Katherine Freese and colleagues, dark stars might have been some of the first types of stars to form in the universe ( SN: 1/1/08).
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