WASHINGTON—Scientists for the past 15 years have been looking for evidence of a type of star only hypothesized but never observed—one powered not by the fusion of atoms like the sun and other ordinary stars but by mysterious stuff called dark matter.
Thanks to the James Webb Space Telescope’s ability to peer back to the dawn of the universe, the first good candidates to be “dark stars” have been identified.
The three objects spotted by Webb, which was launched in 2021 and began collecting data last year, were initially identified last December as some of the universe’s earliest-known galaxies but, according to researchers, instead might actually be humongous dark stars….