Evidence of ‘Monster Stars’ Found in Early Universe

One of the greatest mysteries the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) was developed to investigate was the birth of supermassive black holes (SMBHs). For more than twenty years, astronomers have puzzled over how these gravitational behemoths – weighing millions to billions of solar masses – could exist less than a billion years after the Big Bang. According to the most widely accepted cosmological models, massive black holes did not have enough time to form through the usual processes of black hole formation and mergers.

Recent observations have challenged these models and supported the alternative hypothesis that the “seeds” of SMBHs formed directly from collapsing clouds of cosmic gas,known as the direct collapse black holes (DCBHs).The only alternative is that stars existed during the early Universe (Population III stars) that were massive enough to leave behind a massive black hole. Using the JWST, an international team has found the first evidence supporting the theory that “monster stars” of 1,000 to 10,000 solar masses existed in the early Universe.

The team was led by Devesh Nandal,a Swiss National Science Foundation Postdoctoral fellow from the University of Virginia and the Institute for Theory and Computation (ITC) at the Harvard & smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA). He was joined by Daniel Whalen,a Senior Lecturer in Cosmology at the Institute of Cosmology and Gravitation (ICG) at the University of Portsmouth; Muhammad A. Latif, an astrophysicist from United Arab Emirates University (UAEU), and Alexander Heger, a researcher from the School of Physics and Astronomy at Monash University.

Using the JWST, the team examined chemical signatures in GS 3073, a galaxy originally identified in 2022 by Latif, Whalen, and colleagues from the Institute for Astronomy (IfA) at the University of Edinburgh, the University of Exeter, and the Herzberg Astronomy and Astrophysics research Centre. At the time,the finding team noted an extreme nitrogen-to-oxygen ratio (0.46), far higher than could be explained by any known type of star or stellar explosion. This led them to theorize that the first stars in the Universe, known as Population III, formed from turbulent flows of cold gas a few hundred million years after the Big Bang.

They also noted that GS 3073 contains an actively feeding black hole at its center, wich could be the remnant of one of these “monster stars.” the existence of this kind of stellar object, they claimed, would explain why Webb had detected multiple quasars that existed less than 1 billion years after the Big Bang.