NASA’s powerful recent eye on the universe can have caught sight of dark matter.
The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) spotted three candidate “dark stars” that could be powered by particles of annihilating dark matter, based on recent peer-reviewed research.
“Discovering a brand new form of star is pretty interesting all by itself, but discovering it’s dark matter that’s powering this — that may be huge,” study co-author Katherine Freese, director of the Weinberg Institute for Theoretical Physics on the University of Texas, Austin, said in an announcement.
Dark matter is believed to constitute a lot of the material universe, but it surely can’t be seen by conventional telescopes. We are able to chart its presence through gravitational effects, equivalent to when an enormous galaxy passes in front of a distant star and magnifies the sunshine. Dark stars could also be fueled by particles of dark matter, just as “normal” stars like our sun are powered by “normal” matter.
Related: James Webb Space Telescope celebrates 1st 12 months of science with jaw-dropping view of cosmic nursery (photo)
Dark stars, in the event that they do indeed exist, could also be key to helping us understand how the universe first got light. For about 15 years, scientists have speculated that “dark stars” were among the many first our universe ever produced, when it was just 700 million years old.
Their interesting moniker comes from the song “Dark Star,” first played in 1967 by The Grateful Dead, the research team that first predicted dark stars told Space.com in 2009. (One other inspiration was Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young’s 1977 song, also called “Dark Star.”)
JWST’s observations suggest that the three distant objects, which all are from early within the universe’s history, meet the important thing characteristics of dark stars: they’re luminous, but too cool for fusion to be happening, the July 11 paper within the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences stated.
“There are a set of undetermined parameters that control the formation and evolution of a dark star, and ultimately, its observable properties,” the authors cautioned within the study. But they stressed that that they had used “plausible values” for the energy of particles of dark matter in constructing the models for these theoretical objects.
The three candidate dark stars (referred to as JADES-GS-z13-0, JADES-GS-z12-0, and JADES-GS-z11-0) stands out as the goal of future JWST observations, to search for “dips or excess of sunshine intensity in certain frequency bands” which will match other predictions for the energy of dark stars.
JWST has already thrown other strange puzzles at researchers, equivalent to demonstrating the variety of galaxies created within the universe’s early history look like too high to match standard models of the history of the cosmos.