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James Webb Space Telescope May Have Spotted the Universe's First Supermassive Dark Stars Edited by: Fasi Uddin Ancient Stars That Defy Expectation The universe's first stars are thought to have formed only a few hundred million years after the Big Bang , from pristine clouds of hydrogen and helium. Yet, new research using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) suggests that these primordial beacons may have looked very different from the fusion-powered stars that astronomers have studied for centuries. A research team led by Cosmin Ilie of Colgate University, working with Shafaat Mahmud and Jillian Paulin of the University of Pennsylvania and Katherine Freese of the university of Texas at Austin, reports the detection of four extraordinarily distant objects. Their study, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences , argues that these candidates could be supermassive dark stars  —   a long-theorized class of stars powered not by nuclear fusion, but by sel...