Scientists Propose ‘Dark Stars’ as Seeds of the First Supermassive Black Holes

Astrophysicists have suggested that “dark stars”—hypothetical early-universe objects powered by dark-matter annihilation—could explain the origin of the first supermassive black holes.

Unlike ordinary stars that shine through nuclear fusion, dark stars would have been fuelled by the annihilation of dark-matter particles concentrated in their cores. These objects could have grown to enormous sizes, hundreds of thousands of solar masses, before collapsing into black holes that later seeded the quasars observed less than a billion years after the Big Bang.

The idea gains support from the detection of a stochastic gravitational-wave background by pulsar-timing arrays. Some models attribute part of that low-frequency hum to the mergers or collapses of such early dark stars. If confirmed, the mechanism would help resolve a long-standing puzzle: how black holes of a billion solar masses formed so quickly in the young universe.

Observational tests remain challenging. Future gravitational-wave detectors and high-redshift surveys with the James Webb Space Telescope and next-generation facilities may provide further constraints. For now the dark-star hypothesis offers a theoretically consistent pathway linking particle physics, early-universe cosmology and the observed population of supermassive black holes.