In the first moments after the Big Bang, the universe may have given rise to objects unlike the familiar stars — dark stars. Their key difference from ordinary stars like the Sun lay in their energy source: instead of nuclear fusion, they were powered by the annihilation of dark matter particles — a hypothetical substance that emits no electromagnetic radiation but reveals itself through gravity. According to theoretical models, when these particles collided, they released energy that heated the star from within.

The growth mechanism of such objects resembles a snowball rolling down a mountain: the more gas a dark star attracted, the more massive it became, which in turn strengthened its gravitational pull on new matter. This process allowed it to accumulate up to millions of solar masses. When its own gravity reached a critical threshold, a colossal curvature of spacetime emerged, and the object irreversibly collapsed into a black hole, a region where gravity is so strong that not even light can escape. This collapse scenario was predicted by Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar and Richard Feynman: they showed that for such a massive object, no internal pressure, whether thermal or quantum, could withstand gravitational collapse.

This mechanism likely explains how seeds of supermassive black holes, the very ones observed today at the centers of galaxies, formed in the early universe. Without dark stars, ordinary stars, whose masses are limited and grow slowly, would not have had enough time to accumulate billions of solar masses within the first few hundred million years after the Big Bang. A striking detail: a dark star with a mass of a million suns would have a radius comparable to Pluto's orbit, yet its surface temperature would be lower than that of an incandescent bulb filament — meaning it would remain virtually invisible in the optical range.