Since 2007, astronomers have proposed the existence of a weird type of star: one powered by the heat of dark matter. In cosmology, dark matter is a difficult thing to explain because we literally don’t know what it is. We can’t see it, hence the name “dark,” but without it factored into our equations of […]
Scientists for the past 15 years have been looking for evidence of a type of star only hypothesized but never observed – one powered not by the fusion of atoms like the sun and other ordinary stars but by mysterious stuff called dark matter.
NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has caught a glimpse of what could possibly be the first-ever ‘dark stars’
Stars powered with dark matter still need proving but could reveal clues about the nature of one of the universe’s great mysteries
A trio of astrophysicists, two from Colgate University and the third from the University of Texas, has found evidence of dark stars courtesy of data from the James Webb Space Telescope. In their study, reported in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Cosmin Ilie, Jillian Paulin and Katherine Freese, analyzed three galaxies spotted by […]
Stars beam brightly out of the darkness of space thanks to fusion, atoms melding together and releasing energy. But what if there’s another way to power a star?
The first stars of the universe were very different than the stars we see today. They were made purely of hydrogen and helium, without heavier elements to help them generate energy in their core. As a result, they were likely hundreds of times more massive than the sun. But some of the first stars may […]
The first stars of the universe were very different than the stars we see today. They were made purely of hydrogen and helium, without heavier elements to help them generate energy in their core. As a result, they were likely hundreds of times more massive than the sun. But some of the first stars may […]
Katherine Freese ’77, a physicist at the University of Texas, Austin, has proposed that dark matter wasn’t created in the Big Bang along with all other matter, but rather in a second Big Bang some weeks later. Freese, who was recently elected to the National Academy of Sciences and serves as director of the Weinberg […]