An international team of scientists have found evidence that monster stars 1,000 to 10,000 times the mass of our Sun existed a mere billion years after the Big Bang.
The find could answer a decades-old mystery: how supermassive black holes appeared so soon after the Universe’s creation, when there hadn’t been enough time for normal stars to produce them.
More Webb science
Using James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) data, researchers found unusual chemical signatures in galaxy GS 3073: an extreme imbalance of nitrogen to oxygen that no known type of star can explain.
Devesh Nandal from the Harvard–Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, co-author of the paper, explains: "Chemical abundances act like a cosmic fingerprint, and the pattern in GS 3073 is unlike anything that ordinary stars can produce.
"Its extreme nitrogen matches only one kind of source we know of: primordial stars thousands of times more massive than our Sun."
It’s thought that when these short-lived stars die, they don’t explode but instead collapse into massive black holes.
"Our discovery helps solve a 20-year cosmic mystery," says the study’s co-author Daniel Whalen, from the University of Portsmouth.
"These cosmic giants would have burned brilliantly for a brief time before collapsing into massive black holes, leaving behind the chemical signatures we can detect billions of years later."
The search is now on for similar chemical imbalances in other galaxies to strengthen the case for the existence of these ultramassive stars.
