In the faint radio pulses of distant neutron stars, astronomers may be hearing an echo from the universe's first moments — the gravitational afterglow of hypothetical 'dark stars' that collapsed billions of years ago and planted the seeds of the cosmos's largest black holes. A team of researchers proposes that these exotic objects, powered not by nuclear fire but by self-annihilating dark matter, could explain both a mysterious gravitational wave hum detected in 2023 and the puzzling existence of supermassive black holes that appear fully formed in a universe too young to have built them. It i