Posted on by Paul M. Sutter

The First Stars May Have Weighed More Than 100,000 Suns

The epoch of reionization was when light from the first stars could travel through the early Universe. At this time, galaxies began assembling, as did black holes. Why did some early galaxies have ancient stars? That's a question JWST will help answer. Credit: Paul Geil & Simon Mutch/The University of Melbourne
The epoch of reionization was when light from the first stars could travel through the early Universe. At this time, galaxies began assembling, as did black holes. Why did some early galaxies have ancient stars? That's a question JWST will help answer. Credit: Paul Geil & Simon Mutch/The University of Melbourne

The universe was simply different when it was younger. Recently astronomers have discovered that complex physics in the young cosmos may have led to the development of supermassive stars, each one weighing up to 100,000 times the mass of the Sun.

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