大象传媒

Many of you may be familiar with the idea that when looking up at the night sky what you are actually seeing is light from stars produced millions of years ago, which is just hitting the Earth. Well, a team of astrophysicists in labs across the world has been theorising that if you went really, really far back in time we'd likely find a number of supermassive stars - or celestial monsters - in the heavens above.

Now with the release of pictures and analysis of galaxies being formed relatively soon after the Big Bang, the predictions of such celestial monsters having been a reality has been given a real boost.

Newsday heard from Corinne Charbonnel - the professor at Geneva University who led an international team of astrophysicists working on models that predict celestial monsters. Their forecasts are being tested by images generated by the James Webb Telescope looking deep into the past at young galaxies billions of light years away:

"What my team has done is the calculations that forecasts the existence in theory of these huge stars... so we haven't seen monster stars themselves. But what we have seen is their chemical signatures because our models predict... they would produce huge amounts of nitrogen."

"And what the James Webb Telescope has seen is these very compact star clusters... which are very rich in nitrogen [despite being] very young galaxies - which is a support to our theory."

(Pic: The globular cluster Messier 13 - a dense stellar crowd where massive superstars may be; Credit: Nasa)

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