Astronomers using the James Webb Space Telescope have found the first evidence of the oldest and most massive stars in the Universe. These “dinosaur stars” existed shortly after the Big Bang and could have been up to 10,000 times more massive than the Sun.
Like Earth’s dinosaurs, these giant stars are long gone. But their “cosmic fossils” have been preserved as black holes. Scientists say these supergiant stars help explain how supermassive black holes grew so rapidly, reaching millions of solar masses in the first billion years of the Universe.
The discovery suggests that such “stellar dinosaurs” in the early Universe played a key role in the formation of galaxies and modern supermassive black holes. Scientists are now searching for similar nitrogen-rich galaxies to confirm this conclusion.
