The powerful new eye of NASA is likely to have captured the dark matter in the universe.
Three candidates of fabled “dark stars” have been spotted by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) that are likely to power the particles of annihilating dark matter, as per the new peer-reviewed research.
“Discovering a new type of star is pretty interesting all by itself, but discovering it’s dark matter that’s powering this — that would be huge,” stated study co-author Katherine Freese, who is also director of the Weinberg Institute for Theoretical Physics at the University of Texas, Austin, in a statement.
It is believed that dark matter constitutes most of the universe’s material, however, conventional telescopes cannot see it. Humans can chart its presence with the help of gravitational effects like when a massive galaxy passes from the front of a distant star and the light gets magnified.
Dark stars can be fueled by dark matter’s particles just like “normal” matter power the “normal” stars like our sun. According to researchers, if the dark stars actually exist they may be the key to understanding how the universe got its light.
Darks stars among the first things to exist within universe
For 15 years, scientists have been speculating that “dark stars” were among the first things ever produced by our universe, when it was only 700 million years old.
The observations of James Webb suggest that the three distant objects, which existed in the earliest phase of the universe, match the key requirements of dark stars. The spotted objects are luminous, but too cool for fusion to take place, the paper stated in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
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“There are a set of undetermined parameters that control the formation and evolution of a dark star, and ultimately, its observable properties,” the authors stated in the study. However, they emphasised that “plausible values” have been used by them for the energy of particles of dark matter in creating models for such theoretical objects.
The three candidates of dark stars, known as JADES-GS-z13-0, JADES-GS-z12-0, and JADES-GS-z11-0, can become the target of future observations that the James Webb telescope makes, to look for “dips or excess of light intensity in certain frequency bands” that may be similar with other predictions made for the energy of dark stars.
