Stars fueled by the self-annihilation of dark matter might have been spotted for the first time by JWST
In a first, the James Webb Space Telescope may have glimpsed a rare type of star that astronomers aren’t even sure exists. These stellar objects, called “dark stars,” might not have been fueled not by nuclear fusion but by the self-annihilation of dark matter—the invisible stuff that is thought to make up about 85 percent of the matter in the universe.
The researchers can’t yet prove that the objects are dark stars—only that their characteristics are consistent with being either dark stars or galaxies populated by regular fusion-powered stars. JWST’s technology is sufficient to do that job, however, says study co-author Cosmin Ilie, an astrophysicist at Colgate University. All researchers need is more observation time. “We hope we are going to find one of these dark stars with the Webb within its lifetime,” Ilie says.
In the early universe, dark stars could have formed from the collapse of helium and hydrogen clouds made in the big bang. If dark matter particles are also their own antiparticles, as many dark matter theories posit, then within these collapsing clouds, those particles would have collided with each other and self-annihilated. The collision would have kicked off a chain of particle decay that ended with the production of photons, electron-positron pairs and neutrinos.
“Now you’ve got a weird thing,” Freese says. “It looks like the sun in terms of its surface temperature, but it’s a billion times as bright. It could be as bright as an entire galaxy of fusion-powered stars.”
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