‘Celestial Monsters’: James Webb Reveals the Existence of Stars 10,000 Times Bigger than the Sun

2023-05-31 08:00:00

Astronomers have identified signs of supermassive stars in an ancient galaxy located 13.3 billion light-years away

If you thought the Sun was a huge star, a team of astronomers now suggests they have found, with the help of NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, evidence of even bigger stars at the dawn of the universe.

These supermassive stars, nicknamed “sky monsters”, would be 10,000 times larger than the host star of the solar system, in addition to being up to five times hotter, burning at a temperature of 75 million degrees Celsius, indicate in a study published in the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics magazine.

Scientists claim to have found traces of these ‘cosmic monsters’ when analyzing globular clusters in GN-Z11, an ancient galaxy located 13.3 billion light-years away (ie 500 million years after the Big Bang).

Globular clusters are the most primitive stellar groupings in the cosmos. These spherical bodies contain hundreds of thousands or millions of stars and are present in all kinds of galaxies. In the Milky Way, for example, some 180 of them have been detected, indicates the Spanish Astronomy Society.

Stars in star clusters are born almost at the same time from the same cloud of dust and gas, so they are all expected to contain the same proportions of chemical elements over time.

However, in globular clusters an “abundance anomaly” occurs, since, for some reason, some stars have more elements than others. Because?

Supermassive stars: an explanation

One possible explanation for this mystery, the scientists write, is that supermassive stars “contaminated” the original gas cloud while globular clusters were forming, causing the mismatch of chemical components.

However, this hypothesis is difficult to test, since the theoretical “sky monsters”, being bigger and hotter, also have a shorter lifespan. In other words, they can no longer be directly observed, but only the traces they left behind.

“Globular clusters are between 10 and 13 billion years old, while the maximum lifespan of superstars is 2 million years,” said Mark Gieles, one of the study authors. However, now NASA’s powerful observatory seems to have found a clue that these bodies exist.

Revealed by the James Webb Telescope

Using the infrared vision of James Webb in the globular cluster of the galaxy GN-Z11, a very high density of stars was discovered, in addition to large proportions of nitrogen. That finding, the scientists write, would suggest that several globular clusters are forming and therefore still harbor a “sky monster.”

“The strong presence of nitrogen can only be explained by the combustion of hydrogen at extremely high temperatures, which only the core of supermassive stars can reach,” said Corinne Charbonnel, lead author of the research.

The next step for scientists will be to check with the JWST telescope if this abnormal abundance is true in other globular clusters of distant galaxies.

Fuente: larepublica.pe