As bright as a hundred million Suns: The clusters of monster stars that lit up the early universe
Wednesday, April 22, 2015 - 09:30
in Astronomy & Space
The first stars in the Universe were born several hundred million years after the Big Bang, ending a period known as the cosmological ‘dark ages’ – when atoms of hydrogen and helium had formed, but nothing shone in visible light. Now researchers have calculated what these objects were like: they find that the first stars could have clustered together in phenomenally bright groups, with periods when they were as luminous as 100 million Suns.