Hi, I'm Iraflato, and you're listening to Science Friday.

Today on the podcast, one theory about the early days of our universe and how stars then

might not be like stars we have now.

This dark matter annihilation takes place throughout the star, which, by the way, is really weird looking.

Its radius is 10 times the distance between the Earth and the Sun.

These are cool, big, puffy beasts.

Scientists think they may have discovered a new kind of star.

They named it a dark star, but it actually shines very brightly.

I know it sounds weird.

Considering that the star is believed to be powered by dark matter, not nuclear fusion,

weirdness is par for the course in cosmology, is it not?

It goes without saying this idea is controversial, but a team of astrophysicists say they have spotted evidence

for the existence of these dark stars in data collected by the James Webb Space Telescope.

The study was published in the proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Joining me now are two of the authors of that research. Dr. Catherine Fries is a theoretical astrophysicist

and professor of physics University of Texas at Austin. She first proposed the existence of dark stars

in 2007 and Dr. Cosman Ilya, an assistant professor of physics and astronomy at Colgate University. Welcome to Science Friday.

Thank you. Thank you. It's great to be here. Oh, it's nice to have you. Dr. Freeze, what exactly

is a dark star? A dark star would be the very first kind of star that formed in the history of the

universe when it was about 200 million years old.

They're made of hydrogen and helium from the Big Bang, almost entirely of ordinary stuff, but they're powered by dark matter.

The way the first stars form is inside proto-galaxies that weigh about a million times as much as the sun, and smack in the

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