Link to a short explainer video
For decades, astronomers have struggled to explain how supermassive black holes formed less than a billion years after the Big Bang. Standard stellar processes cannot produce black holes that large so quickly.
New observations from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope provide a compelling solution. Astronomers have found evidence that the early universe contained supermassive “monster stars,” weighing between 1,000 and 10,000 times the mass of the Sun.
By studying a distant galaxy known as GS 3073, researchers detected an unusually high ratio of nitrogen to oxygen—far beyond what normal stars can produce.
The most likely explanation is that these short-lived, extremely massive stars rapidly collapsed into black holes, leaving behind distinct chemical signatures. This discovery helps explain both the origin of early supermassive black holes and the chemical evolution of the young universe.
We should def call them Super Stars
Big fan of MonStars
Everybody get up, its time to jam now
Me too
And my axe body spray
Or Grand Stars like Super Mario Galaxy
Maybe call the white dwarfs Rock Stars once they solidify.
Thank you.
Astronomers call them Population III stars.
No. Most pop III stars were 100s of solar masses, not 1000s of solar masses.
Monster stars would be a subset of pop III stars
They made a third one?
I loved Populous I and II !
well done, sir.
I like kurzgesagt name for them. Black hole stars.
For reference. https://youtu.be/aeWyp2vXxqA?si=Tm100kbBIaV0jKCI
Black hole sun.....won't you come...and provide us supermassive stars
And the superstars sucked into the supermassive
and wash away the paaaaain...
Alive, in the Superunknown! Different tune, but it still works, considering the context.
First it steals your mind and then it steals your
i'm stupid, but for anyone else who was curious, Betelgeuse is ~1,400x the size of our sun — which i then learned isn't even the largest known star. UY Scuti is ~1,700x the size of our sun, so a star 10,000x the mass of our sun is definitely a monstar.
Even crazier: that’s SIZE, not mass. UY Scuti’s mass is at most only 40 or 50 times that of our sun.
I've got a lot to learn about how giant stars are measured because this is already breaking my fragile mind.
There's a YouTube chameleon called astrum that makes some really good content that I would recommend if you want to learn some cool stuff about the universe.
Alex has lulled me to sleep many times. Love Astrum
thanks! I'll definitely queue them up later tonight, I like listening to space facts, absolutely not understand what they're talking about, but their passion and conviction is nice to hear. usually ends with "wow, that's really big..." with existential dread seeping in soon after.
appreciate the recommendation! I love video essays
And he does pretty good considering he’s a lizard
I love chameleons 😁
I’ve been binging Astrum for like a week now at work, I just throw on the 2+ hour videos and it gets me through.
Fusing heavier elements makes the star burn significantly hotter which makes the pressure significantly higher which causes the star to get significantly larger in diameter.
Basically the outward pressure from heat overcomes the inward pressure from gravity and the equilibrium is at a much larger radius.
Jesus Christ, I can only imagine the size of a star 10,000× the MASS, not size, of our tiny little sun
I'm not sure about this star but they should be the same size as or even bigger than the entire solar system up to Uranus' orbit. Big enough that it takes several years for the shockwave of the core collapsing to reach the surface.
The reason why the mass of those large stars doesn't "keep up" with their volume is due to them being at their giant stage, meaning that they're close to the end of their life and with a very low density. At some point in time, those large 40-50x Earth mass stars were smaller as well during their main phase (still larger than our Sun obviously)
How large a star 10,000x the mass of Earth is depends on how dense it is (obviously) as densities of stars vary greatily during their lifecycle, although I'm not sure what kind of lifecycle such a star world even experience
Slight correction: 10,000x the mass of the sun, not Earth.
Yeah, and the surface of the really big ones aren't round. They get pushed around by their own forces into presumably a wave-like pattern. Flubber in space going bonkers in place.
Just a nuclear blob blobbing with nuclear reactions
Just remember that size and mass are two different things. There are some stars that are about 20 km in diameter, roughly 70,000 times smaller than our sun size-wise, but have a mass that can be 1.4 to 2.35 times more massive than our sun.
Is that like a neutron star?
Yep
What are thooose!
Aka pulsar
aren't these black hole stars or quasi stars
No the article says they’re burning helium in their cores, which makes me assume they don’t have a black hole at their core
I wonder if one day we we will find something that makes the biggest object we know of a speck like Earth is to space
I was thinking about a hypermassive black hole, one that has a Schwarzchild radius the size of the observable universe.
Just look outside at night. You're inside of it.
That's conjecture.
Yes. But I'm probably right.
Remind Me: 1 x 10100 years
Present your proof and the world can accept your hypothesis.
Bro have some fun, relax
So I need to ask but how do they figure out what chemicals are left from these stars in a different galaxy? Does the telescope have some kind of filter or something that let it see those things?
Absorption spectra maybe? Don't know but that's my guess. Basically the cooler gas around stars blocks light of specific wavelengths and depending on the elements you get different gaps in the wavelengths of light received.
Yes. They have a filter and it's called Spectroscopy.
What if there were black holes before the big bang?
Could be. I think that the big bang was the final black hole of a previous universe collapsing on itself.
What if the Big Bang is the starting point of a universe which first expands and reaches max expansion then contracts into itself? As if two points on the extreme opposite sides of an ellipse?
Ive thought that for the longest theory. That's my belief and I can't back it up with math or science. But logically it sounds practical to me and im sticking with it.
But the expansion of the universe in increasing, not decreasing.
And it's space itself that is expanding. Everywhere. Faster and faster.
We think its increasing. Could be increasing. Which could also just mean the universe is still young.
It's accelerating. Definitely. Not maybe.
Could the expansion be driven by difference in total energy level? For example water from a height falling down, from higher potential energy to lower.
I understand that space is expanding faster but I always think about what is it expansion into? Like, space is expanding into a different kind of space, makes my head swirl.
It isn't expanding into anything. Space is expanding. The space between you and your phone, the space between the earth and the moon, the space between the Milky Way and Andromeda. And the older the universe gets, the faster it expands. The expansion is being driven by "Dark Energy". Meaning no one really knows what's causing it.
Ahh, so, it’s not extra space being added but space is being stretched sort of?
Technically, space isn't being stretched either. Just the distances between objects.
Expansion is the increase in distances over time between objects. In bound systems this doesn't happen, so talking about expansion inside bound systems like galaxy clusters doesn't make sense. Nothing is happening between you and your phone, or between the Earth and the moon.
Space itself "expanding" is just a coordinate-dependent interpretation; there is no actual physical process in which space "expands". An arguably much more natural way to interpret expansion is kinematical, that is, distant galaxies moving away from each other through space in free fall motion, with late-time acceleration provided by the gravitational repulsion of dark energy.
Also, accelerating expansion means that the recession velocities of distant objects increase over time, instead of decreasing as they would do in a matter-dominated universe. It does not mean that space "expands faster", which implies that the Hubble parameter is increasing, when in reality it is decreasing over time.
Martin Rees and Steven Weinberg
John A. Peacock, Cosmological Physics
There’s a recent paper that calls this into question https://youtu.be/2VpP-qXuJMc?si=xX893hwPn68k8KnB
Yes, but there's also recent evidence to suggest the rate of acceleration is decreasing. It would be a neat solve for the crisis in cosmology.
It's not increasing per se. It's breathing. Inflating. It will inflate and deflate. Because the universe is the lungs of a Koopa.
I agree. I do not have any mathematical knowledge to back up the ellipse idea but it seems so symmetric and balanced. I understand black holes swallow matter and eject X-Rays, Gamma Rays etc, which shows how matter and energy must be conserved. When there is nothing there to feed a black hole the entirety of its energy must release at once I think.
I think it reaches a point where literally every atom in thr universe is swallowed that reality itself collapses and causes an immense explosion.
Yes, sort of like returning to point zero, a complete reset.
Which raises the question about higher and lower dimensions. What happens there?
If all universes and all dimensions end in the same way, then there must be a theory of everything which can explain the entire life of a universe.
Also, what happens to the speed of light in different dimensions?
It’s called the Big Crunch theory.
Or it's what happens when black holes form from star collapse.
We are just in a black hole. Then, when all the Jawking radiation runs out and everything is stretched to infinity from time, the event horizon from our parent universe explodes and all that's left are the black holes inside.
And it goes on forever and ever....
We’d never know.
Well, there are some theories that support this; Roger Penrose’s Conformal Cyclic Cosmology theory comes to mind. There are also theories that suggest the Big Bang could have been the product of a white hole, and mathematically speaking, I believe with this theory you would then have to assume that black holes came before the Big Bang (Einstein–Rosen bridge).
Remember they are just guessing because previous theories broke. Nothing yet has been proven and goalposts are keep moving.
Aren’t these literally just quasistars
i know there is a "your momma so fat" joke here... somewhere
You momma so fast she was showing me her black hole during the early universe
Yo momma is so massive she causes gravitational lensing.
yo momma so fat i can see her butt just from the light she bends
Is this related to the Universe being much denser within the first few hundred million years, so the first stars could grab more gas when they were forming?
Ahhh maybe?
SiniStars
Wow. 10,000 times bigger than our Sun. The universe never stops surprising us.
Extrapolate this 10× or a hundred 💯×....wow
Correct me if I’m wrong but another “most likely explanation” is that the “Big Bang” wasn’t the beginning of the universe.
I’d like to know the theories of prior to the Big Bang.
Reason why I say this is that the “big bang” explanation to the public for eons doesnt hold weight now that we see further back in time.
I think it’s best to say, at this time, is that we don’t know.
Well theres no theory thats even near being even on the same Level as the big bang theory
Ok - was thinking of asking chat GPT but lazy rn 🤓
That tracks
Personally, I’m going with the whole cappuccino foam universe theory. Our observable universe is just another bubble in a soup of bubbles. Lots of big bangs. No real edges. New bubbles push away or envelop older bubbles.
We’ll be able to detect those bubble edges our bangs bubble is touching, or see into the next bubble over.
Source - this guy
We also might be able to see an imprint of another universe too.
Yes maybe more n more data will enable us to see bubbles outside of our bubble. Ok.
Why not? We can detect remnants of super nova and such in a galactic medium…
Who’s to saw we don’t end up with much higher resolution for the CMB? Only to determine what we see is the edge of something else interacting with the edge of what we see?
Hillbilly’s can dream right?
It’s a better reality! than what has been foisted on us for decades
There is no "before" the big bang as time does not exist at that point. One of the theories I've seen for possible universe formation events are white holes.
From Wiki:
A 2012 paper argues that the Big Bang itself is a white hole.\21]) It further suggests that the emergence of a white hole, which was named a "Small Bang", is spontaneous—all the matter is ejected at a single pulse. Thus, unlike black holes, white holes cannot be continuously observed; rather, their effects can be detected only around the event itself. The paper even proposed identifying a new group of gamma-ray bursts with white holes.
White hole - Wikipedia
I don’t think we can say time did not exist before the Big Bang, since the Big Bang happened 10^-43 seconds after the moment of theoretical creation. Just from that definition, time did exist before the Big Bang. Also, mathematically speaking, it was my understanding that for a white hole to exist there needs to be an accompanying black hole to create an Einstein–Rosen bridge, so if a black hole existed, space existed, meaning time had to exist as well.
Also, I think a blanket statement saying time did not exist at this point is impossible to make. In the past, I thought it could be interesting to think of time and space being in some sort of superposition, and I’ve also found Roger Penrose’s Conformal Cyclic Cosmology model an interesting one to consider, as this model does predict the existence of time before what we call the Big Bang.
I don’t believe the Big Bang theory ever was, or is currently, a theory that tries to give a scientific foundation to the creation or the beginning of the universe. It was always my understanding that the Big Bang theory theoretically tries to model what happened the moment after creation (10^-43 seconds) and tries to model an extremely hot and dense universe, or a time where all the fundamental forces were joined together as one unified force (the Planck era), and then tries to explain inflation and so on (this is my gross oversimplification of the Big Bang theory). The Big Bang theory does hold a lot of weight, and we have observable evidence for it: the cosmic microwave background, the point where the universe cooled down enough for the opaque plasma of free electrons and nuclei, which acted like a thick fog, to allow photons to travel more freely through space. So I don’t think you can say the Big Bang theory holds no weight, as we do have a lot of evidence for some sort of cosmic expansion and universal temperature cooling.
Now, that all said, could this model be incorrect? Yes, this has happened many times in history. Just look at heliocentric vs. geocentric models of the solar system. We had a mathematical system that placed the Earth at the centre of the solar system (or universe) that predicted the movements of the planets quite accurately using complicated models that used circles within circles, and planets traveling in epicycles (forwards and backwards) that would cause retrograde motion. Even though the mathematical model made accurate and correct predictions for the placements of the planets, it was physically wrong. We would have to wait for the genius of Copernicus and Kepler to contribute to the more accurate heliocentric elliptical model. Hope this makes sense.
Fake pickture of the Suns.
We only have 1 suns
Shh don't tell the alien our secrets