"Celestial Monster" Stars Up To 10,000 Times Our Sun's Mass Dropped Hints For JWST

They really did refer to them as "celestial monsters" according to the crew. These were stars that had a mass between 5,000 and 10,000 times that of the Sun and had a maximum lifespan of two million years. They were five times hotter at their cores than the Sun's.

There are numerous diverse locations where these enormous stars might originate, but globular clusters caught the attention of experts. These star clusters are the largest, oldest, and densest in the entire cosmos. These supermassive stars are also thought to have originated in globular clusters, but they are not yet immediately visible.

"Superstars have a maximum life span of two million years, whereas globular clusters are between 10 and 13 billion years old. As a result, they left the currently viewable clusters fairly quickly. Only indirect remnants are still present, according to co-author Mark Gieles, an ICREA professor at the University of Barcelona.

However, they do leave behind heavier substances. And it is this sign that the JWST has discovered in galaxy GN-z11, an object that formerly held the record for being the furthest galaxy known. Astronomers now know a lot more about this object whose light originates only 400 million years after the Big Bang thanks to JWST's studies.

"It has been established that it contains very high proportions of nitrogen and a very high density of stars," co-author Daniel Schaerer of the University of Geneva stated. Additionally, the additional nitrogen is thought to be a telltale marker of the transient but significant presence of the supermassive stars in these globular clusters. Unless you had stars that were sufficiently large, you wouldn't obtain as much of that element.

"The strong presence of nitrogen can only be explained by the combustion of hydrogen at extremely high temperatures, which only the cores of supermassive stars can reach, as shown by the models of Laura Ramirez-Galeano, a Master's student in our team," lead author Professor Corinne Charbonnel, also of the University of Geneva, explained.

The model can explain the anomaly in nitrogen abundance, but it is not conclusive confirmation of the presence of supermassive stars. More JWST measurements of distant galaxies are planned to bolster the team's study. The findings have been published in the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics.

The discovery of geysers near Saturn's moon Enceladus' south pole catapulted the previously low-profile satellite to the top of planetary scientists' priority list. Enceladus is not just one of a half-dozen (or maybe a dozen) worlds in the Solar System having seas concealed behind frozen crust, but it also often sprays chunks of that ocean into space, with some of the particles becoming part of Saturn's E ring.

In conjunction with the finding Enceladus possesses all of the components required for life - at least the ones we know of - thus a sample of the plumes is priceless. The plume might include signs of biological activity, showing that the cosmos is teeming with life.

Given the length of time, until a spacecraft is ready to gather plume samples, any bit of information we can glean is valuable. When the JWST recently focused its attention on that area, it generated more than a scrap, capturing the scale of an eruption. "It's enormous," Goddard Space Flight Center's Dr. Sara Faggi stated at a symposium last week, according to Nature.