Cosmin Ilie, assistant professor of physics, in collaboration with Katherine Freese (University of Texas), Andreea Petric (the Space Telescope Science Institute), and Jillian Paulin (University of Pennsylvania), has been awarded $84,500 funding for a project titled “Probing the nature of Dark Matter with the first stars and galaxies in the Universe.â€
The project aims to investigate the nature of the elusive dark matter particle by using observations of the first stars and galaxies in the universe. They will use data taken with the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) in conjunction with other observatories. The team will focus on the identification of stars that are powered by dark matter, i.e., dark stars. Those objects can form under special conditions only met during the first few hundred million years after the Big Bang.
In 2023, the researchers successfully identified the first-ever three dark star candidates in the JWST data. By investigating the dark star candidates, the project aims to provide insights into the formation of supermassive black holes and the unexpectedly bright early galaxies observed by the JWST, thereby addressing some of the most perplexing puzzles in contemporary astronomy. The proposed work will open up a new field in astronomy, the observational study of dark matter–powered stars, and will contribute significantly to two of the most fundamental scientific questions today: what is dark matter, and how can we find it?