Too early carbon and dark stars: the most recent discoveries of James Webb Telescope

The most recent shattering discovery of the James Webb telescope is the detection of carbon in the cosmic dawn (see this). According to the standard view of formation of elements, such an early presence of carbon is impossible.

TGD view of the formation of elements is based on the notion of dark fusion, which was originally developed to explain "cold fusion". This process can be initiated at rather low temperatures and involves the formation of dark proton sequences at monopole flux tubes. Dark nuclei are essentially scaled variants of nuclei but much smaller binding energy.

They can decay spontaneously to ordinary nuclei and also protons can transform to neutrons. This mechanism would generate protostars in which there is no ordinary fusion yet. The temperature increases because essentially nuclear binding energy is liberated when the dark nuclei transform to ordinary nuclei and eventually ordinary fusion is ignited. It is quite possible that all nuclei heavier than Fe are generated in this way rather than in supernova explosions. Also many anomalous abundances of lighter nuclei could be understood.

One can imagine also another, not necessarily independent, mechanism explaining the too early presence of carbon. It would be allowed by the zero energy ontology of TGD. In TGD counterparts of ordinary state function reductions the arrow of time changes. These state function reductions can occur in arbitrarily long length scales in the TGD Universe. This means that even astrophysical objects live forth and back in geometric time and their developmental age can be much longer than the usual age. Besides astrophysical objects older than the Universe, this could explain the presence of carbon.

Recently James Webb telescope discovered also dark stars of gigantic size (see this). For dark stars dark nuclear fusion could have continued without ignition of the ordinary nuclear fusion. One can of course ask whether dark stars could be unstable against local ignition, which could lead to its decay to ordinary states.

The second option possibly explaining dark stars is the transformation of dark matter and energy of extremely thin monopole flux tubes to ordinary matter and dark energy, a process analogous to inflation. The two explanations of dark stars might be closely related.

For a summary of earlier postings see Latest progress in TGD.

For the lists of articles (most of them published in journals founded by Huping Hu) and books about TGD see this.