Scientists have suggested that the detected gravitational wave background may have originated from the collapse of hypothetical dark stars into supermassive black holes in the early universe, according to the website infohub.kz.
Researchers Sohan Ghodla and Cosmin Ilie from Colgate University studied the nature of the low-frequency gravitational wave background detected using pulsars. According to their data, this cosmic hum may contain signals from the merger of black holes that formed more than 13 billion years ago.
The scientists considered a scenario in which primordial black holes arise from the collapse of supermassive dark stars. Such hypothetical objects existed in the early cosmic history and maintained their temperature through the energy of dark matter rather than nuclear fusion. They could accumulate mass up to a million times that of the Sun before turning into black holes.
Simulations showed that the descendants of dark stars could produce a significant or even dominant part of the observed background. Meanwhile, black holes formed by the direct collapse of gas clouds were rarer and contribute less to the signal. This work opens a new way to study dark matter and the era of cosmic dawn.