NASA’s James Webb Telescope Just Uncovered “Dinosaur-Like” Stars So Massive They Make Our Sun Look Tiny

Astronomers using the James Webb Space Telescope have made a remarkable discovery, revealing the first evidence of enormous, short-lived stars from the early universe. These “dinosaur-like” stars, with masses up to 10,000 times that of the Sun, likely collapsed into supermassive black holes, leaving behind key chemical clues that could help explain the formation of these cosmic giants.

The discovery was made while studying the galaxy GS 3073, which exhibited an unusual chemical signature—specifically, an imbalance in nitrogen and oxygen levels. This anomaly was linked to the collapse of these massive stars, which had a brief, yet intense existence.

Massive Stars of the Early Universe

Astronomers have long theorized about the existence of incredibly massive stars that once lit up the early universe. According to Daniel Whalen, a researcher at the University of Portsmouth and co-author of the study published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters:

“Our latest discovery helps solve a 20-year cosmic mystery. With GS 3073, we have the first observational evidence that these monster stars existed,” he said.

Whalen describes these ones as “prehistoric titans,” whose rapid lives and violent deaths left behind “cosmic fossils” in the form of black holes.

“These cosmic giants would have burned brilliantly for a brief time before collapsing into massive black holes, leaving behind the chemical signatures we can detect billions of years later. A bit like dinosaurs on Earth — they were enormous and primitive. And they had short lives, living for just a quarter of a million years — a cosmic blink of an eye,” he added in a statement released by the University of Portsmouth.

A Unique Chemical Fingerprint

One of the key pieces of evidence in this discovery was the nitrogen-to-oxygen ratio found in GS 3073, which could not be explained by typical stellar processes. Devesh Nandal from the Center for Astrophysics, Harvard and Smithsonian, this imbalance in chemical abundances acts like a “cosmic fingerprint.”

“And the pattern in GS3073 is unlike anything ordinary stars can produce. Its extreme nitrogen matches only one kind of source we know of — primordial stars thousands of times more massive than our sun.” 

Instead, it suggests that supermassive stars, burning through nuclear fusion at incredible rates, were responsible for spreading these elements. Their brief but intense lives created the conditions necessary for the formation of supermassive black holes and contributed to the overall composition of the galaxies that would later form.

The Link to Supermassive Black Holes

The collapse of these dinosaur-like stars into black holes provides a potential explanation for how supermassive black holes grew so quickly in the early universe. These stars, unlike ordinary stars, did not go through a supernova explosion; instead, they collapsed directly into black holes.

According to Whalen, this direct collapse means that these early black holes could have been thousands of times the mass of the Sun, helping them grow into the supermassive black holes we observe today. Whalen and his team suggest that this black hole may be a “descendant” of the black holes formed by the early monster stars.