NASA captures 3 objects from 'other world' for the first time

They are three "legendary" objects that are 10 billion times brighter than the Sun, made of the opposite type of matter and may have been "extinct" billions of years before sending four ghosts to Earth.

Scientists have long proposed two hypotheses about the first generation of stars in the universe that no means of observation has been able to detect:

1. One is a "population III star" that burns hydrogen;
2. The second is a "dark star" made of hydrogen and helium but powered by burning dark matter instead of nuclear fusion like the Sun.

One of those two types of stars may have just been captured by the "monster" James Webb, according to Sci-News.

Close-up portrait of a dark star - (Photo: SCI-NEWS).

James Webb is a super telescope developed and operated primarily by NASA, with support from ESA and CSA (the European and Canadian space agencies), with a vision billions of light years away.

Light from those objects also takes billions of years to reach the telescope's "eye," so the instrument also provides a time-lapse look into the ancient universe.

This time, it discovered three strange objects in the space-time region just 320-400 million years after the Big Bang that  created the universe, about 13.4 billion light years away from us.

They are JADES-GS-z13-0, JADES-GS-z12-0 and JADES-GS-z11-0 , discovered by the James Webb Advanced Deep Galactic Survey (JADES) mission.

JADES-GS-z13-0, JADES-GS-z12-0 and JADES-GS-z11-0, of which JADES-GS-z11-0 was duplicated in two due to the gravitational lensing effect created by closer galaxies, which is powerful enough to bend space-time - (Image: NASA/ESA/CSA)

Dr Katherine Freese, an astrophysicist from the University of Texas at Austin (USA), one of the key members of the JADES team , said they were initially identified as early galaxies.

However, in-depth spectral analysis shows that this is not the case. They are actually the three "legendary" dark stars.

Dark stars are mistaken for galaxies because they are 10 billion times brighter than the Sun , as bright as an entire galaxy made of normal stars. They are called dark stars because they are made of dark matter - invisible, but may make up 25%-80% of the universe, according to some studies.

Dark matter particles do not emit light, but when they collide inside a star and annihilate, the thermal energy is transferred to the collapsing hydrogen clouds, creating a light that is brighter than that of a star that glows with nuclear fusion.

In theory, dark stars are powerful enough to turn into supermassive black holes - also known as monster black holes - after they die.

So these "ghosts" from the past will help solve the long-standing puzzle of why the early universe had so many incredibly large black holes and so many things that looked like large galaxies.

Previously, it was thought that this was absurd because a large galaxy with a supermassive black hole at its center like our Milky Way would need a lot of time to merge from small galaxies together.