"Let there be light." The dark ages of the Universe ended when the first stars began their nuclear fusion of hydrogen, giving off heat and light about 100 million years after the Big Bang. Current understanding of these Population III—or low metal—stars is that they evolved and lived a solitary life or, at most, as part of a distant binary system. New simulations reported in this week's edition of Sciencexpress, however, suggest that the gas clouds that birthed these early stars were gravitationally unstable and produced tight clusters of stars that would live their short lives together.
No direct observational evidence of Pop III stars has been found to date. The information we have about them and their behavior has come exclusively from simulation and theoretical work. Previous work has found that, as atomic hydrogen was pulled into dark matter minihalos, it would form molecular hydrogen and coalesce into a gas cloud—ripe for the formation of primordial stars—with a mass of around 1000 solar masses.
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