When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission.An illustration of a monster star in the early universe. | Credit: Robert Lea (created with Canva)Using the James Webb Space Telescope, astronomers may have discovered the first evidence of dinosaur-like monster stars that existed shortly after the Big Bang. These prehistoric stellar titans are theorized to have had masses as great as 10,000 times that of the sun.Like the dinosaurs, these monster stars aren’t around anymore, but like Earth’s geology is populated by fossils of dinosaurs, the universe is filled with the “cosmic fossils” left behind by these earliest stars: black holes. In fact, confirming these stars existed at such tremendous masses in the early universe could help explain how supermassive black holes grew to masses equivalent to that of millions of suns before the cosmos was even 1 billion years old.AdvertisementAdvertisementAdvertisementAdvertisementThe James Webb Space Telescope’s (JWST) tantalizing first evidence of these titanic stars was delivered when a team of astronomers set about investigating the chemical makeup of a galaxy called GS 3073, which is located around 12.7 billion light-years away and is seen as it was just 1.1 billion years after the Big Bang. The “smoking gun” in this case was an imbalance of nitrogen to oxygen in GS 3073 that can’t be accounted for by any known type of star.”Our latest discovery helps solve a 20-year cosmic mystery. With GS 3073, we have the first observational evidence that these monster stars existed,” team member Daniel Whalen of the University of Portsmouth in the U.K., said in a statement. “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. A bit like dinosaurs on Earth — they were enormous and primitive. And they had short lives, living for just a quarter of a million years — a cosmic blink of an eye.”A galaxy with strange chemistryThe “smoking gun” in this case was an imbalance of nitrogen to oxygen in GS 3073 that can’t be accounted for by any known type of star. The galaxy has a nitrogen-to-oxygen ratio of 0.46, which is much greater than can be explained by any known type of star or stellar explosion.”Chemical abundances act like a cosmic fingerprint, and the pattern in GS3073 is unlike anything 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,” team member Devesh Nandal from the Center for Astrophysics (CfA), Harvard and Smithsonian, said in the statement. “This tells us the first generation of stars included truly supermassive objects that helped shape the early galaxies and may have seeded today’s supermassive black holes.”AdvertisementAdvertisementAdvertisementAdvertisementThe team took this information and modeled the evolution of stars with masses ranging from 1,000 to 10,000 times the mass of the sun to determine what elements the stars would forge and then seed through their galactic homes following their supernova deaths. This revealed a …
