Three early galaxies discovered by the James Webb Space Telescope could actually be titanic stars powered by a dark matter heart.
The James Webb Space Telescope may have found evidence of a strange and elusive type of star that only existed in the very early universe, when invisible dark matter was one of the only available fuel sources.
Dark matter, which is all but invisible because it doesn't interact with light, makes up an estimated 85% of the matter in the universe. Theory suggests that when two dark matter particles collide, they may"annihilate" each other, turning their combined mass into a shower of energetic gamma-ray radiation.
"Dark matter annihilation doesn't care about the temperature," Freese said."So you have dark matter annihilation throughout the entire [width] of the dark star. And the surface temperature is relatively cool. Because of that, there's no ionizing photons or other stuff coming off preventing the accretion of more matter."
Dark star, or ancient galaxy?Given their huge size, dark stars would appear as more spread-out objects rather than as point-like objects, like modern-day stars. This is how three ancient objects detected by the JWST — namedJADES-GS-z13–0, JADES-GS-z12–0, and JADES-GS-z11–0 — could have been misidentified as galaxies, according to the new research. These candidate dark stars date to between 320 million and to 420 million years after the Big Bang.
"As dark stars get displaced from the dark-matter-rich center, the dark stars start collapsing," Freese explained."This will trigger fusion in the smaller ones, creating ordinary fusion-powered stars [which are all created from collapsing clouds of gas]. The bigger ones will collapse immediately into black holes."
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