James Webb Telescope Discovers Early Universe Stars

James Webb Space Telescope has discovered ancient stars, termed 'monster stars', in the early universe that may play a crucial role in understanding the formation of supermassive black holes. These stars, with masses ranging from one thousand to ten thousand times that of our sun, were identified in a galaxy known as GS 3073, which formed approximately one billion years after the Big Bang.

The findings were published on November 12 in the Astrophysical Journal Letters, co-led by scientists from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and the University of Portsmouth in the U.K. Notably, these stars exhibited an unusual nitrogen to oxygen ratio of 0.46, a chemical signature predicted for primordial stars of such massive scale.

The study's co-author Daniel Whalen described these stars as enormous and primitive, living only for about a quarter of a million years before collapsing into massive black holes. The process of nitrogen creation in these stars involves burning helium to produce carbon, which then mixes with hydrogen to generate nitrogen, eventually leaking into space.

The research suggests that these massive stars did not explode as typical supernovas but collapsed directly, potentially giving rise to the first supermassive black holes. If confirmed, this discovery could resolve two significant cosmic mysteries: the origin of the nitrogen detected and the formation mechanism of early black holes.

GS 3073 also appears to harbor an actively feeding black hole at its center, possibly a remnant of one of these primordial stars.