A Universe Full Of See-Through Stars

Mysterious discoveries around the globe have opened up a tantalising possibility: the cosmos could be full of ghostly stars that are invisible to our most sensitive detectors

- Colin Stuart

Look up at the sky after sunset and the familiar quilt of night is punctured with bright stars. These blazing furnaces are so vivid that we can see their light, despite the fact that even the nearest are quadrillions of kilometres away. It’s a sight most of us have seen on countless occasions, so you’d be forgiven for thinking that all stars must behave this way. After all, isn’t shining just what a star does? Yet if a flurry of recent findings is to be believed, there’s an entirely different class of stars lurking out there – stellar ghosts cloaked under a veil of darkness. These transparent, invisible stars give out no light whatsoever, meaning they skulk unseen in the celestial shadows.

Astronomers already suspect that, unlike ordinary stars, most of the Universe is hidden from view. When they look at galaxies, such as our own Milky Way, they find stars on the outer edges moving far too fast. So fast, in fact, that they should fly off into space. For them to be kept in tow there has to be something reining them in. The most popular explanation is that there’s a lot of hidden material in the Galaxy providing a significant amount of extra gravity. Scientists call this material ‘dark matter’ and it’s thought to outnumber the ordinary matter that you and I are made of by a ratio of more than five to one.