Reversing the cosmic evolutionary model built on the vast astronomical knowledge of humanity today, a group of scientists has successfully discovered “giants” 10,000 times the mass of the Sun.
According to Space, the greatest “giants” in the world of stars today weigh only a few times more than our Sun. These extremely massive stars are incredibly rare. However, 13 billion years ago, their “ancestors” were entirely different.
For a long time, astronomers have determined how stars exist today, surrounded by worlds with rich chemical properties like Earth: Through many generations, stars die and leave behind an increasingly rich legacy for the next generation, just as species evolve.
Graphic of the wild primordial universe with giant supernovae and glowing monster black holes… – (Photo: ESA).
To understand 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 sophisticated computer simulations to “reverse” cosmic time.
They chose to explore the “dark ages,” a few hundred million years after the Big Bang, when the first generation of stars emerged “from nothing.”
This computer model included all components of ordinary matter in the universe: dark matter that helps develop galaxies, the evolution and clumping of neutral gas, and radiation that can cool or heat the gas…
Additionally, it featured something particularly important for the first stars: Cold, fast-moving streams of material colliding with already formed structures.
They discovered a complex network existed before the first generation of stars: Neutral gas began to clump together. The primordial universe was primarily composed of hydrogen and helium, which released heat to help these neutral gas clumps achieve increasingly higher densities.
High-density clusters became very warm, creating radiation that broke apart neutral gas and prevented it from fragmenting into smaller clumps. Therefore, the stars born from these clusters were extremely massive, with a common size of about 10,000 times that of the Sun, which is 1,000 times larger than the biggest stars today.
These would be extremely bright stars with very short lifespans, lasting less than 1 million years. In their violent deaths as supernovae far greater than today’s supernovae, these “giants” began to release into the universe the products they created from nuclear fusion in their cores—elements heavier than hydrogen and helium.
This cycle continues throughout the universe, and 13 billion years later, the universe is filled with much smaller stars containing an incredibly rich chemical composition, including many heavier elements.
However, because the universe is filled with heavy elements, neutral gas clusters never became hot enough or large enough to create giant monsters again.
The study has just been published online in the scientific data repository arXiv and is awaiting peer review by the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society for official publication.
