The first stars in the cosmos may have topped out at over 10,000 times the mass of the sun, roughly 1,000 times bigger than the biggest stars alive today, a new study has found.
Nowadays, the biggest stars are 100 solar masses. But the early universe was a far more exotic place, filled with mega-giant stars that lived fast and died very, very young, the researchers found.
And once these doomed giants died out, conditions were never right for them to form again.
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The cosmic Dark Ages
More than 13 billion years ago, not long after the Big Bang, the universe had no stars. There was nothing more than a warm soup of neutral gas, almost entirely made up of hydrogen and helium. Over hundreds of millions of years, however, that neutral gas began to pile up into increasingly dense balls of matter. This period is known as the cosmic Dark Ages.
In the modern day universe, dense balls of matter quickly collapse to form stars. But that’s because the modern universe has something that the early universe lacked: A lot of elements heavier than hydrogen and helium. These elements are very efficient at radiating energy away. This allows the dense clumps to shrink very rapidly, collapsing to high enough densities to trigger nuclear fusion – the process that powers stars by combining lighter elements into heavier ones.
But the only way to get heavier elements in the first place is through that same nuclear fusion process. Multiple generations of stars forming, fusing, and dying enriched the cosmos to its present state.
Without the ability to rapidly release heat, the first generation of stars had to form under much different, and much more difficult, conditions.
Cold fronts
To understand the puzzle of these first stars, a team of astrophysicists turned to sophisticated computer simulations of the dark ages to understand what was going on back then. They reported their findings in January in a paper published to the preprint database arXiv (opens in new tab) and submitted for peer review to the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
The new work features all the usual…
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