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I've heard about quasi stars a while ago, but I've just recently decided to go more in-depth about the characteristics and facts about them. I learned that they gain their energy through radiation when matter falls into the black hole in the core. I may be wrong about this part, though. I also learned that they can't exist these days because the universe's gases are polluted with metals. Why does that stop quasi stars from existing?

Edit request from comment: A quasi star is a hypothetical star that existed in the early ages of the universe. It got its energy from a black hole at its core, unlike normal stars that get energy through nuclear fusion.

https://medium.com/predict/quasi-stars-black-holes-at-the-core-of-the-universes-largest-stars-38bfbc4e1b95

If you would like more specifications, please tell me

chowder
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This is a highly uncertain prospect, since the physics of the system itself relies on processes that are themselves uncertain to varying degrees, e.g., stellar nuclear evolution of very high-mass stars, accretion of gas onto compact objects, etc...

A relevant paper, cited by the wiki article for quasistars, is the work by Begelman $\it{et~al.}$ (2007). They show that newly formed quasistars should have surface temperatures higher than 10,000 K (9,700 °C). As a quasistar cools over time to a limiting temperature of 4,000 K (3,730 °C), for metal-free (Population III) opacities, at and below which hydrostatic equilibrium is no longer sustainable, the end of the quasistar's life leaves behind an intermediate-mass black hole.

Such quasistars would have a short lifespan, at most ~ 7 Myrs, during which the core black-hole would grow into an intermediate-mass black hole which are suspected to be the progenitors of current-epoch supermassive black holes. This implies that quasistars are transient, and so observing them directly would be very difficult. However, it is possible that we could observe indirect effects of their existence on their environments, for example this is how we infer the existence of common envelope evolution, or on the evolution of intermediate-mass black holes.

Daddy Kropotkin
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