The James Webb Space Telescope

[pinball1970]

Pre print on MoM-z14

https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.11263

Article here

https://phys.org/news/2026-01-webb-boundaries-universe-closer-big.html

 

[Astronuc]

An article on giant (or monster) stars came to my attention. Astronomers have been looking at system GS 3073 with the JWST.

Cambridge, MA (December 9, 2025)— For two decades, astronomers have puzzled over how supermassive black holes, which are some of the brightest objects in the universe, could exist less than a billion years after the Big Bang. Normal stars simply couldn't create such massive black holes quickly enough.

Now, using NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), an international team of astronomers has found the first compelling evidence that solves this cosmic mystery: “monster stars” weighing between 1,000 and 10,000 times the mass of our Sun existed in the early universe. The breakthrough came from examining chemical signatures in a galaxy called GS 3073.

A new study led by scientists from the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian (CfA) and the University of Portsmouth in England has discovered an extreme imbalance of nitrogen to oxygen that cannot be explained by any known type of star.

In 2022, researchers published work in Nature predicting that supermassive stars naturally formed in rare, turbulent streams of cold gas in the early universe, explaining how quasars (extraordinarily bright black holes) could exist less than a billion years after the Big Bang.

“Our latest discovery helps solve a 20-year cosmic mystery,” said Daniel Whalen from the University of Portsmouth's Institute of Cosmology and Gravitation. “With GS 3073, we have the first observational evidence that these monster stars existed.

Too Much Nitrogen Pops Open the Search for the Universe’s First Stars
https://aasnova.org/2025/11/21/too-much-nitrogen-pops-open-the-search-for-the-universes-first-stars/

Turbulent cold flows gave birth to the first quasars (Nature, 2022)​

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-022-04813-y

The key to the discovery was measuring the ratio of nitrogen to oxygen in GS 3073. The galaxy contains a nitrogen-to-oxygen ratio of 0.46, far higher than can be explained by any known type of star or stellar explosion.

Devesh Nandal, a Swiss National Science Foundation postdoctoral fellow at the CfA’s Institute for Theory and Computation said, “Chemical abundances act like a cosmic fingerprint, and the pattern in GS 3073 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. This tells us the first generation of stars included truly supermassive objects that helped shape the early galaxies and may have seeded today’s supermassive black holes.”

The researchers modeled how stars between 1,000 and 10,000 solar masses evolve and what elements they produce. They found a specific mechanism that creates massive amounts of nitrogen:

• These enormous stars burn helium in their cores, producing carbon;
• The carbon leaks into a surrounding shell where hydrogen is burning;
• The carbon combines with hydrogen to create nitrogen through the carbon/nitrogen/oxygen (CNO) cycle;
• Convection currents distribute the nitrogen throughout the star; and,
• Eventually, this nitrogen-rich material is shed into space, enriching the surrounding gas.

The process continues for millions of years during the star's helium-burning phase, creating the nitrogen excess observed in GS 3073.

1000–10,000 M_⊙ Primordial Stars Created the Nitrogen Excess in GS 3073 at z = 5.55
https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/2041-8213/ae1a63
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.04435

Connecting JWST discovered N/O-enhanced galaxies to globular clusters:
evidence from chemical imprints, Xihan Ji et al., 26 November 2025
https://academic.oup.com/mnras/article/545/3/staf2110/8343310


Dating N-loud AGNs at high redshift
GS_3073 as a snapshot of a ω Centauri-like evolution of a nuclear star cluster
F. D’Antona et al, 26 August 2025
https://www.aanda.org/articles/aa/full_html/2025/08/aa54957-25/aa54957-25.html

the chemical properties of this system match those expected at a specific point in the evolution of the abundances in the extreme populations of the former nuclear star cluster ω Centauri (ωCen). This analogy, along with the N/O, C/O, and Fe/O abundances in GS_3073, lead to an estimate of an age range of 270–440 Myr for this object, which is much younger than the redshift (z=5.5) age of ∼1 Gyr.

Edit/update: I was curious about the distance from earth to GS 3073, which is not to be confused with NGC 3073.

GS 3073, which lies in the southern constellation Fornax the Furnace at a distance of approximately 12 billion light-years. The study, led by the University of Portsmouth in England and the Center for Astrophysics (CfA), Harvard and Smithsonian in the U.S., discovered an extreme imbalance of nitrogen to oxygen that cannot be explained by any known type of star.

Ref: https://www.astronomy.com/science/monster-stars-existed-in-the-early-universe/

NGC 3073 is a dwarf lenticular galaxy in the constellation Ursa Major. It is at a distance of about 65 million light-years (20 megaparsecs) from Earth.
Ref: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NGC_3073

 

[pinball1970]

There is this also. https://academic.oup.com/mnras/article/546/2/stag089/8426287?login=false

Analysis of 31 galaxies with average redshift 7.3

From phys.org

"As a result, we found that they are on average ~600 Myr old, according to the comparison with theoretical models based on previous knowledge of nearby galaxies. Our models include all of the known possibilities: old and young stellar populations, thermally-pulsating AGB stars, emission lines associated with HII regions, black holes in active galactic nuclei (AGN), interstellar dust extinction, and intergalactic extinction from neutral hydrogen...

If this result is confirmed, it would invalidate the standard Lambda-CDM cosmological model. Certainly, such an extraordinary change of paradigm would require further corroboration and other stronger evidence. Anyway, it would be interesting for other researchers to try to explain the Spectral Energy Distribution of JADES-1050323 in standard terms, if they can ... and without introducing unrealistic/impossible models of extinction, as is usually done."

 

[pinball1970]

Nebula PMR 1, a NIRCam and MIRI side by side image.

Also referred to as the cranium Nebula as it looks like an exposed skull.

5000 ly from earth, Vela constellation, a planetary Nebula, a dying star shedding its outer layers of gas and dust.

"Planetary" Nebula is historical nomenclature as these distant objects must have appeared as planets with early telescopes.

 

[pinball1970]

Some information on the region.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Westerhout_51

Article on the image.

https://phys.org/news/2026-03-webb-reveals-hidden-w51-star.html

The paper.

https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/1538-3881/ae40b7