What is it about?
Dark Stars may have been the first stars to form in the history of the Universe when it was 200 million years ago. Made almost entirely of hydrogen and helium from the Big Bang, they were powered by dark matter annihilation. With an initial weight comparable to that of the Sun, they can grow to become ten million times as massive and 10 billion times as bright as the Sun. We have found candidates for these Supermassive Dark Stars in the data from the James Webb Space Telescope, the sequel to the Hubble Space Telescope. Once these stars die, they collapse to become Supermassive Black Holes, which can then grow and merge to become ever larger, explaining the 'Big Black Hole" problem of the early universe.
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Why is it important?
Discovery of Dark Stars would be exciting for many reasons: It heralds the discovery of an entirely new type of star. It would also teach us about the dark matter that constitutes most of the mass in the Universe.
Perspectives
I"m incredibly excited about the prospect of finding conclusive evidence of Dark Stars. When we proposed them in 2007, it just seemed like a fun creative idea to work on. Most new ideas die because some observational evidence rules them out quickly. However, this idea keeps getting better. My collaborator Cosmin Ilie worked out in 2010 (at the time he was my graduate student) what Dark Stars would look like in the James Webb Space Telescope, and now we have candidates! Even better, we realized very early on that the heaviest dark stars, once the dark matter fuel is gone, collapse to black holes and SOLVE a big problem in the early universe: The otherwise hard to explain Supermassive Black Holes also found by JWST and other telescope. Here's to Dark Stars! from Katherine Freese, NAS member
Katherine Freese
university of Texas at Austin
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Spectroscopic Supermassive Dark Star candidates, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, September 2025, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences,
DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2513193122.
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