James Webb Telescope Discovers 'Dinosaur-like' Stars

Using the James Webb Space Telescope, astronomers have potentially discovered the first evidence of 'dinosaur-like' monster stars that existed shortly after the Big Bang. These stars are theorized to have had masses as great as 10,000 times that of the sun.

The discovery emerged from the investigation of a galaxy called GS 3073, located approximately 12.7 billion light-years away, observed as it was just 1.1 billion years after the Big Bang. A key finding was an imbalance of nitrogen to oxygen in GS 3073, which cannot be explained by any known type of star.

Team member Daniel Whalen from the University of Portsmouth stated that this discovery helps solve a 20-year cosmic mystery by providing observational evidence that these monster stars existed. The galaxy GS 3073 displays a nitrogen-to-oxygen ratio of 0.46, exceeding what ordinary stars could produce.

Devesh Nandal from the Center for Astrophysics at Harvard and Smithsonian noted that the chemical pattern in GS 3073 is unlike anything produced by known stars, suggesting the presence of primordial stars thousands of times more massive than our sun.

The team modeled the evolution of stars with masses ranging from 1,000 to 10,000 times that of the sun, revealing that these stars could create significant amounts of nitrogen. As these monster stars would have burned brightly for a short period before collapsing into massive black holes, they left behind chemical signatures detectable billions of years later.

The study predicts that these stars collapse directly into black holes without a supernova explosion, allowing them to form massive black holes that could seed today’s supermassive black holes. The team plans to search for more nitrogen-rich galaxies in the early universe to further support the existence of these monster stars.