A new paper proposes that the universe's first stars were about as different from twinkling, sunlike stars as you can get. These "dark stars," it argues, were fueled by huge globs of annihilating dark matter and seeded the galaxies we see today.
Strange as they are, such stellar bodies explain one of the newer mysteries in astronomy.
In December 2022, the James Webb Space Telescope identified three ancient galaxies as part of its JWST Advanced Deep Extragalactic Survey (JADES). These distant, deeply redshifted objects existed between 320 million and 400 million years after the Big Bang, making them among the earliest objects ever identified in the nascent universe. How had they formed so quickly, considering the first stars are estimated to have ignited not long before?
The new study proposes that these galactic ancestors were not galaxies at all.
“When we look at the James Webb data, there are two ...
