Astronomers examining ancient light seen by the Webb Space Telescope have found three prickles that they believe could be “dark stars,” theoretical objects powered by dark matter.
First color images from the Webb Space Telescope
Dark matter makes up about 27% of the universe; Its mystery partner, dark energy, accounts for about 68%. You can do the math: We know incredibly little about what the universe is made of and how it behaves. Webb’s recent targets appear in this region of cosmic uncertainty. The team was researched published Last week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The three targets are JADES-GS-z13-0, JADES-GS-z12-0, and JADES-GS-z11-0 and were identified as galaxies by Webb in December 2022. The targets were imaged as part of the JWST Advanced Deep Extragalactic Survey (JADES). ), which takes images of the deep field of space, and searches very ancient light to help scientists understand the evolution of cosmic structures such as galaxies.
All three objects are from a time when the universe was between 320 and 400 million years old, which makes them very young (in a cosmological sense). And while they could be galaxies containing millions of stars, the latest research team hypothesizes that they are dark stars never seen before, which can be millions of times the mass of our sun and could be fueled by collisions of dark matter particles. rather than nuclear fusion.
Dark matter isn’t literally black, at least not necessarily. It’s called dark matter because it’s almost impossible for humans to detect. We see dark matter in its gravitational effects; Dark matter halos glomeruli with light, astronomers see more clearly when dark matter bends and focuses photons that pass through its gravitational field.
Although scientists don’t know what dark matter is made of, they do have some ideas. As Gizmodo reported earlier this year:
There are a couple of major dark matter candidates (and it’s not a zero-sum game; many dark matter candidates could be contributing to the universe). Weakly Interacting Massive Particles (WIMPs) are theoretical objects that have mass and behave like particles, but interact very little with ordinary matter, hence our inability to recognize them.
The other major candidate is the axion, a theoretical particle (a boson, to be exact) named after laundry detergent. The axis would be much smaller than a WIMP and it has been hypothesized that it behaves more like a wave than a particle, like photons of light.
In April, a group of scientists studying Einstein rings (distant light gravitationally lensing, which creates a ring of light in space) found evidence that axial dark matter produces a luminosity anomaly in distant quasars.
But because dark matter candidates are not mutually exclusive, WIMPs could very well exist, and the latest research team suspects that WIMPs are at the heart of theoretical dark stars. The idea is that WIMPs in the dark cores of stars collide, annihilating each other and releasing heat energy. This heat is released into hydrogen gas, causing objects to glow.
Kathryn Friese, an astrophysicist at the University of Texas at Austin and one of the study’s authors, said at the University launch. “If some of these objects that look like primordial galaxies are in fact dark stars, then the simulation of galaxy formation agrees better with the observations.”
Black Stars premiered in 2008, but only now is the Webb Space Telescope providing a clear view of some of the oldest lights we can see. The theoretical stars would be cool and puffy and up to ten billion times the luminosity of the Sun, according to the research team.
From time to time astrophysicists describe mysterious structures in space, providing mathematically described solutions to aspects of astrophysics that are completely meaningless under Standard Model of Cosmology. (The same can be said for various dark matter candidates, such as axions, that are set out to explain problems with the Standard Model of particle physics.)
Earlier this year, a team of physicists described the topological soliton, which would look like a black hole due to its gravitational influence but still emit light. Boson stars and serious stars are examples of other objects that have been mathematically proposed but never observed.
In the same way, known objects are potential sites for dark matter production. In 2021, a team of astrophysicists suggested that axions could be produced in the cores of neutron stars, some of the densest objects in the universe. You can think of dark stars the other way around: rather than their centers being factories for dark matter particles, they are the place of their destruction.
The research team believes that dark stars can be misinterpreted as large galaxies and that stars can be seeding supermassive black holes that were seen even in the early days of the universe, the first hundreds of millions of years of its existence.
Some of these supermassive black holes may also be playing a role in the gravitational wave background, which astrophysicists saw the first signs last month. As supermassive black holes orbit each other on the scale of hundreds of millions of years, they cause almost imperceptible ripples in space-time that bounce across the universe.
More observations with Webb will give astrophysicists a better view of these ancient light sources; Whether they’re galaxies or stars fueled by dark matter, we hope we’re not left in the dark for too long.
More: Astrophysicists discover Einstein rings that support the case for axion dark matter
