Making the first stars
(Phys.org) —The first stars in the Universe are believed to have formed only a few hundred million years after the big bang, about 13.7 billion years ago. They heated and ionized the pristine intergalactic medium, and their supernova explosions enriched the primordial gas with the first heavy elements (the Universe was born with only hydrogen and a dash of helium). These stars thus altered in a fundamental way the chemical and thermal state of the gas from which the first galaxies then formed, in turn triggering the first self-sustaining cycle of star formation, feedback, and chemical enrichment. Understanding the formation and properties of the first stars is thus an important step towards a comprehensive picture of structure formation in the early Universe.