An international team from SISSA – Scuola Internazionale Superiore di Studi Avanzati has revealed that the first black holes, boson stars, and exotic “cannibal stars” could have formed within less than a second after the Big Bang. Their groundbreaking study, published in Physical Review D, shows how particle interactions during a possible Early Matter-Dominated Era (EMDE) created the Universe’s first compact objects almost instantly.
The research, conducted in collaboration with INFN, IFPU, and the University of Warsaw, explores a crucial but largely unknown period between cosmic inflation and primordial nucleosynthesis.
The scientists propose that if matter temporarily dominated the Universe during this interval, matter halos could have formed and collapsed through gravothermal processes, creating exotic cosmic structures almost immediately after the Big Bang. “An intriguing possibility is that during this interval, matter temporarily dominated the Universe,” the authors explained, according to the SISSA research publication.
Among the most fascinating objects theorized by the study are cannibal stars—stellar bodies powered not by nuclear fusion like modern stars, but by particle self-annihilations. Simultaneously, the early Universe might have hosted boson stars, where quantum particle properties provide structural support.
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These exotic stars could have populated the newborn cosmos for mere seconds before collapsing further into primordial black holes (PBHs), or the black holes might have formed directly from collapsing matter halos.
The research team discovered that halos formed during an EMDE had relatively small masses—smaller than 10²⁸ grams—and their collapse could have generated even smaller primordial black holes. Using sophisticated theoretical models, they found scenarios where PBHs might be overproduced, violating known observational constraints, while in other cases, asteroid-mass PBHs could form, potentially accounting for all the dark matter in the Universe. Some of these earliest black holes might have evaporated almost immediately, disappearing before primordial nucleosynthesis began between 10 seconds and 20 minutes after the Big Bang.
The findings open remarkable new perspectives for understanding both the ancient and modern Universe. As the authors conclude, “It would be interesting to explore the formation of cannibal stars and boson stars in the present-day Universe, through the collapse of self-interacting dark matter halos.”
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This research transforms our understanding of the cosmos’s earliest moments, revealing that even in its first second of existence, the Universe hosted a rich and complex physical phenomenology that continues to shape our cosmic landscape today.
