in the last couple of years one of the most incredible discoveries coming out of James Webb Space Telescope was essentially this A collection of very strange very distant objects that seemed to exist in the universe when it was only about 300 million years old or even younger Strange red objects representing some of the most distant objects we have ever seen And that's because a lot of these objects are extremely redshifted and are only visible in the infrared light which is of course what the James Web was built to see But so far most studies assume that these were basically baby galaxies or essentially proto galaxies or maybe massive early star clusters that seem to have formed in an extremely early universe Except that in April of 2023 we've discussed a really interesting alternative explanation Maybe at least some of these objects especially the ones that appear to be very compact and the ones resembling a point source could only be explained if these were actually very exotic dark stars A concept of discussed previously but a concept that I wanted to briefly discuss once again just so that all of this makes sense And that's because extremely recently Katherine Freeze and the team you see right here released an additional study that actually provides even more evidence that maybe this is something super super exotic And so let's talk about the study and the explanation in a bit more detail and discuss if this is indeed super massive dark star candidates But first briefly about the idea of dark stars Now historically this concept of dark stars has been proposed a long time ago As a matter of fact as far back as 1783 when early astronomy was still being developed the original dark star concept was by John Michelle who discussed this concept with Henry Cavendish and then published this in a letter to the Royal Society in 1784 That's literally 250 years ago But here he was talking about dark stars that would be actually kind of similar to black holes stars so large and so massive that they would basically trap all light because of the surface escape velocity And while based on modern theories we know that something like this would most likely just become a black hole But over the years scientists have also developed a separate idea once researchers realized that there seems to be a lot of additional stuff in the universe that we could not explain For example dark matter And so the explanations for dark matter that essentially involves some kind of a particle suggested that sometimes some of this dark matter can become extremely dense and collapse into some kind of a cloud-like object that starts to attract a lot of hydrogen and a lot of helium In essence this is actually how today we explain the existence for various galaxies As a lot of dark matter accumulated into larger and larger chunks it started to attract hydrogen and helium that eventually started to coales into larger objects formed some of the first star clusters and basically created early galaxies But in some rare cases some of these dark matter particles might also create their own individual objects with even a little bit of dark matter potentially creating large enough clouds of hydrogen and helium that they start to form individual massive compact objects And though in a typical star normally the energy is produced as a result of fusion which is when hydrogen combines into helium and releases energy inside of these bizarre dark matter objects they start to be powered by something entirely different Tiny dark matter particles start to bump into each other start to annihilate and essentially result in the production of energy as well releasing a tremendous amount of heat that then starts to heat up hydrogen and helium inside the cloud And so this is what a lot of dark matter researchers referred to as dark matter stars or dark stars These would be enormous clouds of hydrogen and helium as large as 1,000 astronomical units across or essentially 50 times as large as the orbit of Pluto that because of this dark matter annihilation produce extremely hot objects with the surface temperature for this hydrogen reaching 10,000 Kelvin kind of resembling these very massive O type stars but also very massive overall over 100 solar masses in mass and as these objects accumulate more and more mass they do start to grow larger larger and larger But at some point once a lot of dark matter has been annihilated and these stars no longer produce enough heat and enough energy to sustain themselves they potentially suddenly collapse resulting in a very massive dense object And with some of the most massive clouds potentially thousands or even millions of solar masses we get a super massive black hole And so some of these objects that can become very large and very massive eventually result in extremely massive central black holes around which we expect a galaxy to form And so this is actually one of the potential explanations for the existence of super massive black holes especially the ones too massive to exist But naturally this was just a hypothesis and just one of the explanations We didn't really have any evidence As a matter of fact up until James Web there's only been some circumstantial evidence of dark matter stars and mostly based on observations of gravitational waves and potential collisions of smaller objects Yet as I mentioned in 2023 at least one study that you can learn more about in one of the videos in description suggested that some of the observations from the GM's web were actually consistent with being point source dark matter stars because it's the only way we could explain their brightness the only way we could explain why they existed so early on and of course explain why they were so tiny and appeared star-like with the initial spectral analysis of some of these objects suggesting they were between 500,000 and 1 million solar masses with luminosity of billions of suns and a radius of at least 10,000 stars which is of course much much larger than any star in the modern universe and though some studies propose that these are just very unusual BB galaxies or maybe even giant black holes covered by a lot of dust And these explanations sort of created even more mysteries If these were giant black holes how exactly did they form so early If these were active stars once again why did they form so early And why there's so many of them in such a small space So basically here no matter what explanation scientists proposed there was always something that was missing However the dark matter star hypothesis originally suggested that such objects could actually exist as early as 200 million years following the big bang So basically these dark matter stars could easily exist in the early universe and would mostly be made out of hydrogen and helium orbiting around a central point made up out of a lot of dark matter particles But following this initial proposition in 2023 we didn't really have any new updates or any new suggestions And that's until now In this recent paper researchers looked at some of these objects even closer but this time decided to focus on something else They used the James Web's ability to analyze colors of light Here we're talking about spectroscopy in order to find out what these objects were made out of and how they're powered And here the focus was on some of the most distant objects discovered such as the ones that used to be record holders These objects existed just under 300 million years following the Big Bang And they also wanted to check the shape of these objects based on the pictures we have because if these were spherical and very small this would actually be more consistent with a dark matter star than any other explanation But the most important part of the study was trying to compare this to computer models that predict dark stars and then seeing if the real observations seem to match And while intriguingly one of the first discoveries was two new objects GSGS Z14 and Z14-1 seem to have light signatures that surprisingly match the predictions As a matter of fact GSGS Z14-0 seems to be the farthest bright object with a very clear light fingerprint that could be used to assess exactly what this is And even though the object appeared as a tiny dot in some of the initial observations its actual morphology or its shape seemed to actually match the prediction for dark stars or dark matter stars surrounded by a cloud of gas that's extremely extremely hot And it was also very massive at least a million solar masses in mass We saw the other objects matching these observations as well and producing very similar emissions But here we had some other explanations without dark matter stars So these observations were not enough We still needed to have some kind of a signal that would be a definitive proof that this is dark stars And while it turns out that one of these observations did have something very unique a very specific dip at a certain frequency or a wavelength of 640 angstrom This is known as the helium 2 absorption line And intriguingly this particular line has been predicted in various models involving dark matter stars But this dip should not exist if this is just a galaxy or a star cluster Although right now this observation and this dip is not super clear We need to have additional powerful observations to establish if it's really there and we definitely need more evidence from other objects because right now this is relatively weak Nevertheless this is an exciting new evidence However there's also a major problem and the problem comes from the observations based on a slightly different dip here by using a different telescope in this case ALMA Researchers also revealed a very specific oxygen line with a wavelength of 88 micrometers And this oxygen line if it exists might be a problem because here it would suggest that this object contains oxygen And in order to contain any heavier elements we need to have supernova which would imply that this object contains stars that have gone supernova in the past Or it would imply that this is not just made out of hydrogen and helium or that this is not a dark matter star at all because dark matter stars should form completely by themselves and basically only contain hydrogen helium and just a tiny bits of lithium And so if here we have both the helium dip and the oxygen signal it would mean that this is maybe something even more complex not just some kind of a simple dark matter star but possibly something even more complicated and something even more bizarre Something that contains signs of dark matter annihilation but also signs of potential supernova Or maybe this is basically just what early galaxies were like They were just so different and so unique that we cannot explain them yet which actually has been the main explanation from some of the previous studies And so until we get more observations and clear signs of certain elements at least for now this is still a very hypothetical idea for the existence of dark matter stars And it will probably take tens or even hundreds of new observations to essentially confirm exactly what this is And so even though the helium 2 absorption is definitely super exciting and currently doesn't make a lot of sense at the moment we cannot definitively say what these objects are And we can only assume that this is maybe very strange early galactic objects But with time and possibly in the next few years I'm sure someone is going to figure this out And until then check out some of the previous videos on similar topics in the description below Thank you for watching Subscribe Come back tomorrow to learn something else Support this channel Patreon where you can actually find a lot of additional footage videos you might have not seen before and videos without any ads Or consider supporting this channel through the channel membership where you can find even more footage or maybe support this 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