Scientists for the past 15 years have been looking for evidence of a type of star only hypothesized but never observed - one powered not by the fusion of atoms like the sun and other ordinary stars but by mysterious stuff called dark matter.
last year, were initially identified last December as some of the universe's earliest-known galaxies but, according to researchers, instead might actually be humongous dark stars.
Dark stars would be able to achieve a mass at least a million times greater than the sun and a luminosity at least a billion times greater, with a diameter roughly ten times the distance between Earth and the sun. "They can continue to accrete the surrounding gas almost indefinitely, reaching supermassive status," said Colgate University astrophysicist and study lead author Cosmin Ilie.
While there is not enough data to make a definitive judgment about these three, Freese said, Webb may be able to obtain fuller data on other similarly primordial objects that could provide "smoking gun" evidence of a dark star.
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