Speaker
Description
The James Webb Space Telescope is transforming our view of the early universe, revealing a population of unexpected sources at cosmic dawn, including ultra-compact, dust free, extremely luminous “Blue Monsters” and the Balmer-break-dominated “Little Red Dots.” These discoveries, together with the growing evidence for massive black holes at very high redshift, highlight emerging tensions with pre-JWST models for the formation of the first stars and their Black Hole remnants. In this talk, I present a review of the Dark Star paradigm—stars powered by dark matter—and its implications for the formation of the first luminous objects. I will summarize the theoretical foundations of Dark Star formation, their subsequent growth into Supermassive Dark Stars (SMDSs), and the predicted observational signatures that distinguish them from conventional stellar populations. I will then connect these predictions to current JWST observations, discussing how SMDSs may provide a unified framework for interpreting the properties of compact high-redshift sources and for explaining the origin of massive black hole seeds at early times. Finally, I will highlight recent observational developments, including JWST NIRSpec results, that offer emerging support for the presence of Dark Star–like objects in the early Universe.
| Main Contribution topic | Cosmology Dark Matter |
|---|---|
| Secondary contribution topic | Astrophysical observations |