Astronomers say NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope may have spotted the universe’s first “dark stars,” primordial bodies of hydrogen and helium that bear almost no resemblance to the nuclear fusion-powered stars we’ve come to know.As detailed in a recent paper published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the team suggests that the very early days of the universe, mere hundreds of millions of years after the Big Bang, may have been home to supermassive dark stars, which were powered by dark matter that eventually led them to self-destruct.“Supermassive dark stars are extremely bright, giant, yet puffy clouds made primarily out of hydrogen and helium, which are supported against gravitational collapse by the minute amounts of self-annihilating dark matter inside them,” said study lead and Colgate University astrophysicist Cosmin Ilie in a statement. Dark matter is the invisible, hypothetical substance that’s believed to make up approximately 25 percent of the universe. Despite its expected abundance, scientists have yet to directly observe or detect it, since its existence is inferred from its gravitational effects on visible matter.The existence of supermassive dark stars could explain why the JWST is finding bright and unexpectedly common galaxies in the furthest reaches of the universe. The supermassive black holes that result from these dark stars could also account for the formation of distant quasars, which are extremely bright galactic nuclei powered by black holes at the centers of galaxies.The theory behind dark stars was first devised in the late 2000s. Since then, researchers have suggested that they could be the result of “Weakly Interacting Massive Particles,” a leading candidate for dark matter, that are believed to annihilate themselves and generate heat in a phenomenon that appears as brightly shining stars. A few hundred million years after the Big Bang would have allowed for the right conditions for these dark stars to form, the researchers suggest.“For the first time, we have identified spectroscopic supermassive dark star candidates in JWST, including the earliest objects at redshift 14, only 300 [million years] after the Big Bang,” said coauthor and The University of Texas at Austin astrophysicist Katherine Freese, in the statement.“Weighing a million times as much as the Sun, such early dark stars are important not only in teaching us about dark matter but also as precursors to the early supermassive black holes seen in JWST that are otherwise so difficult to explain,” she added.In 2023, Freese and her colleagues identified several supermassive dark star candidates in images taken by the JWST’s Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam) instrument, which captures high-resolution images in the near-infrared range, to study the earliest galaxies.Since then, data from the space telescope’s Near-Infrared Spectrograph (NIRSPec), which was designed primarily to study the very earliest days of the universe by measuring several near-infrared bands simultaneously, has become available for analysis.The latest paper builds on the 2023 findings by using NIRSpec data to identify “four spectroscopic dark star candidates, one of them being the second most distant object ever observed.”Ilie claims he and his colleagues may have found a “potential smoking gun signature of a dark star,” finding a “1640 Angstrom absorption dip” in the spectrum of one of the four candidates. Angstrom is a unit of length that’s equal to one hundred-millionth of a centimeter and is usually used to express wavelengths of light.But plenty of research remains until we can confirm the existence of supermassive dark stars populating the earliest universe. The latest findings, however, could help scientists shed more light on the nature of dark matter as well, one of the thorniest and most elusive mysteries plaguing astronomers to date.More on dark matter stars: James Webb Appears to Have Spotted Weird Stars Powered by Dark MatterThe post The James Webb Appears to Have Spotted “Dark Star” Powered by Dark Matter, Paper Claims appeared first on Futurism.