FEB 15, 2010 - Did Dark Stars Spawn Supermassive Black Holes? is the latest twist in the yarn of how everything got here; namely the creation myth known as the Big Bang Theory. A creation myth is the ultimate fairy tale, the one that answers the question, how did we get here? Our industrial civilization having rejected every religion but science, naturally our creation myth is a scientific one. It goes something like this: once, 13.75 billion years ago - yeah, they're pretty sure about that figure, for now - there was nothing; then there was a Big Bang, and the Universe came out - not the Universe we see now, mind you. That took hundreds of millions of years, eventually emerging from a dark period to arrive at the first stars that gave rise to the stars and galaxies we see today. A good cosmogony needs a mysterious and powerful entity to be responsible for at least some key part of creation. Did Dark Stars Spawn Supermassive Black Holes? postulates supermassive stars made of dark matter and regular matter - ooo, the Zoroastrian Sons of Light and Sons of Darkness - as the creators of the supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy and its brethren all over the universe. I'm sure that a thousand years or so from now, this particular creation myth will seem at least as quaint as the traditional tale from China, dating back at least as far the sixth century CE, about how P'an Ku grew so big and so fast that he cracked open the Cosmic Egg and the whole universe emerged. (Cosmic Inflation?) Still, I like this notion of monster dark stars that aren't dark at all, that have the mass of 100,000 suns or more, that create the structure of the galaxies that make up our Universe today. NASA's James Webb Space Telescope, scheduled to launch in 2014 (if there's still a NASA then), may be able to see far enough out into space and far enough back into time to actually spot one of these monster dark matter stars. Or P'an Ku, as the case may be.
