New research suggests the James Webb Space Telescope has identified candidates for Supermassive Dark Stars, ancient giants powered by dark matter annihilation.
The James Webb Space Telescope continues to rewrite cosmic history. New analysis reveals four candidates for “Dark Stars”—colossal objects powered by dark matter rather than nuclear fusion. These theoretical giants, masquerading as early galaxies, could finally explain the “impossible” supermassive black holes found at the very dawn of time.
For decades, astronomers have been haunted by a cosmic paradox. As we peer deeper into the universe’s infancy, we see things that simply should not exist yet. The standard model of cosmology suggests that the first stars were born roughly 200 to 400 million years after the Big Bang. These Population III stars were expected to be hot, massive, and short-lived, fusing hydrogen into helium until they collapsed. However, the data beaming back from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has thrown a wrench into this timeline. JWST has detected objects from the early universe that are inexplicably bright and massive—so much so that if they are standard galaxies, they defy our understanding of how quickly gas can turn into stars.
But a groundbreaking study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) offers a solution that is as elegant as it is terrifying. According to the research led by Cosmin Ilie, Katherine Freese, and their colleagues, these “impossible” galaxies might not be galaxies at all. They might be single, bloated stars of monstrous proportions, powered not by nuclear fusion, but by the annihilation of dark matter. These are the Dark Stars.
The concept of a Dark Star sounds like science fiction, but it is a rigorous prediction of particle physics and astrophysics first proposed in 2007 by Spolyar, Freese, and Gondolo. In the early universe, dark matter was much denser than it is today. As the first clouds of pristine hydrogen and helium began to collapse under gravity to form stars, they did so inside “halos” of invisible dark matter. If this dark matter consists of Weakly Interacting Massive Particles (WIMPs), the density at the center of these clouds would cause the dark matter particles to collide and annihilate, releasing a tremendous amount of heat.
This heat would act as a pressure valve, halting the cloud’s collapse before it ever got hot enough to ignite nuclear fusion. Instead of a compact, hot star like our Sun, you get a “puffy” giant. These Dark Stars would remain cool (surface temperatures around 10,000 Kelvin) but would grow to be colossal, stretching up to 10 Astronomical Units in radius—roughly the size of Saturn’s orbit. Because they don’t rely on fusion, they don’t blow themselves apart; they just keep eating the surrounding gas, potentially growing to millions of times the mass of the Sun.
In their latest analysis, the researchers utilized spectroscopic data from the JWST Advanced Deep Extragalactic Survey (JADES) to hunt for these beasts. Unlike previous studies that relied on photometry—essentially looking at the brightness of an object through different color filters—this new work looks at the spectra, or the chemical fingerprints, of the light. This allows for a much more precise determination of what these objects are made of and how far away they are.
According to the paper, the team successfully identified four spectroscopic candidates for Supermassive Dark Stars: JADES-GS-z11-0, JADES-GS-z13-0, JADES-GS-z14-0, and JADES-GS-z14-1. These objects exist at redshifts greater than 10, meaning we are seeing them as they were when the universe was less than 450 million years old. JADES-GS-z14-0, in particular, stands out as the second most distant luminous object ever observed by humanity.
The data suggests that these objects are consistent with the models of Supermassive Dark Stars. While standard early galaxies are expected to be hot and dominated by nuclear-burning stars, the spectral energy distributions (SEDs) of these candidates fit the profile of cooler, massive objects surrounded by nebulae of ionized hydrogen. The researchers found that their models of Dark Stars—specifically those weighing around one million solar masses—match the observed light from the JWST almost perfectly.
However, the most thrilling aspect of this study is the potential detection of a “smoking gun” signature. Theory predicts that because Dark Stars are massive but relatively cool, their atmospheres should contain singly ionized helium in an excited state. This would create a specific absorption feature in the light spectrum at a wavelength of 1640 Angstroms. According to Ilie and his team, the spectrum of JADES-GS-z14-0 shows a tentative feature exactly where this absorption line should be.
If this helium absorption feature is confirmed by follow-up observations, it would be unprecedented. No known astrophysical object—not a normal star, not a galaxy, not a quasar—exhibits absorption at this specific wavelength. It would be the unique fingerprint of a Dark Star. As the authors note, confirming this feature wouldn’t just rewrite astrophysics; it would be the first concrete discovery of the nature of dark matter particles themselves.
The road to confirmation, however, is not without its bumps. Science is rarely a straight line, and the case of JADES-GS-z14-0 introduces a fascinating complication. While the NIRSpec data analyzed in this study supports the Dark Star hypothesis, another observatory, ALMA, has reported evidence of an oxygen emission line (specifically [O III]) coming from the same system.
This presents a problem because Dark Stars are supposed to form from “pristine” gas—hydrogen and helium left over from the Big Bang, with zero heavy metals like oxygen. The presence of oxygen usually signals that several generations of normal stars have already lived and died, polluting the environment with heavier elements.
Does this rule out the Dark Star theory? Not necessarily. The researchers propose a compelling “hybrid” scenario. It is possible that we are looking at a Supermassive Dark Star that is not isolated. In this scenario, the Dark Star could be embedded within a merging galaxy or a halo that has already begun to form normal stars. The Dark Star provides the immense luminosity and the unique helium signature, while the surrounding environment provides the oxygen emission detected by ALMA. This would imply that Dark Stars can survive even as their neighborhoods become polluted with metals, requiring a theoretical refinement of how these objects evolve.
The implications of proving the existence of Dark Stars extend far beyond just cataloging a new type of celestial body. It solves one of the biggest headaches in modern astronomy: the origin of Supermassive Black Holes (SMBHs).
We see monsters like the black hole at the center of our galaxy, Sagittarius A*, which has four million times the mass of the Sun. But JWST has found black holes at the dawn of time that are millions or even billions of times the mass of the Sun. There simply wasn’t enough time for a standard black hole (formed from a dying star) to eat enough gas to grow that big that fast.
Dark Stars offer the perfect “seed.” When a Supermassive Dark Star finally runs out of dark matter fuel, it collapses. Because it is already millions of times the mass of the Sun, it doesn’t leave behind a small black hole; it collapses directly into a massive black hole of roughly one million solar masses. This provides a “head start,” allowing these seeds to grow into the billion-solar-mass monsters we observe in the early universe, such as the quasar UHZ-1. As the study suggests, the existence of Dark Stars explains both the “too bright” early galaxies and the “too big” early black holes in one fell swoop.
The team has already begun refining their models. They utilized the CLOUDY code to simulate the nebular emission—the glowing gas—that a Supermassive Dark Star would energize. They found that for most candidates, the light we see is a combination of the star itself and the hydrogen cloud surrounding it. This sophisticated modeling allows them to distinguish between a point source (like a star) and an extended source (like a galaxy). Interestingly, JADES-GS-z14-1 appears unresolved, effectively a point source, which aligns perfectly with the morphology of a single, supermassive object.
The scientific community is now on the edge of its seat waiting for further data. The tentative helium absorption line needs to be verified with higher signal-to-noise observations. If it holds up, and if the oxygen conflict can be resolved through the hybrid model, we will have found the first stars in the universe. They weren’t the fiery, fusion-powered ancestors we expected. They were cold, dark-matter-fueled giants that lit up the cosmic dawn and seeded the galaxies we see today.
This study serves as a reminder that the universe is far stranger than we often imagine. We are looking for the invisible interactions of particles we have yet to identify, powering stars the size of solar systems, hidden in the light of the deepest past. As 2025 progresses, the James Webb Space Telescope continues to peel back the layers of time, and it seems increasingly likely that the “Dark Ages” of the universe were actually illuminated by Dark Stars.
