I found a world with 13 billion year old giants

Returning to the model of cosmic evolution built on the immense astronomical knowledge of today’s humanity, a group of scientists managed to discover “giant” is 10,000 times larger than the Sun.

According to the Space newspaper, today the “giant“The largest star in the world is only ten times heavier than our Sun. These extremely massive stars are extremely rare. But 13 billion years ago, “ancestor” Theirs are completely different.

Astronomers have long determined how today’s stars exist, surrounded by chemically rich worlds like Earth: Over many generations, stars die and leave behind. Inheritance becomes richer and richer for the next generation, just like the evolution of all species.

Graphic image of the wild early universe with giant supernovae and glowing monster black holes

Graphic image of the wild primitive universe with giant supernovas, shiny monster black holes… – (Photo: ESA).

To find out how the first stars were born, a team of scientists from the Graduate School of Science at Kyoto University and the Graduate School of Science at Tohoku University (Japan) used a sophisticated computer simulation to “turn around“cosmic time.

They choose to explore “Dark times”, several hundred million years after the Big Bang, when the generation of stars was born “From nowhere”.

This computer model includes all the usual components of the universe: dark matter contributes to the growth of galaxies, the evolution and clumping of neutral gas, radiation can cool or heat the gas…

Plus, it has something particularly important for early stars: Flows of cold, fast matter crash into already formed structures.

They discovered that a complex network existed before the first generation of stars: Neutral gas begins to merge. The poor early universe was mostly hydrogen and helium, but it was they that released heat to help these masses of neutral gases reach higher and higher densities.

High-density clusters become very hot, creating radiation that breaks up the neutral gas and prevents it from fragmenting into many smaller clusters. As a result, the stars born from these clusters are extremely large, with a common size of about 10,000 times that of the Sun, or 1,000 times larger than the largest stars today.

They will be extremely bright stars and will have an extremely short lifespan, less than 1 million years. During a violent death in the form of a supernova much larger than current supernovas, these “giant” These primitives began dumping into the universe the products they had created from nuclear fusion reactions in the core – elements heavier than hydrogen and helium.

This cycle continually repeats itself in the universe and 13 billion years later the universe has stars that are much smaller but contain an extremely rich chemical composition, including many heavier elements.

But also because the universe is full of heavy elements, clumps of neutral gas can never get hot enough and coalesce enough to create giant monsters.

The research has just been published online on the scientific data warehouse arXiv and awaits peer review by the Monthly Notes of the Royal Astronomical Society for official publication.

Article source: NLD