Population III stars Archives

January 15, 2025January 15, 2025 by Brian Koberlein

The First Supernovae Flooded the Early Universe With Water

This artist’s impression shows CR7 a very distant galaxy discovered using ESO’s Very Large Telescope. Credit: ESO/M. Kornmesser

Water is the essence of life. Every living thing on Earth contains water within it. The Earth is rich with life because it is rich with water. This fundamental connection between water and life is partly due to water’s extraordinary properties, but part of it is due to the fact that water is one of the most abundant molecules in the Universe. Made from one part oxygen and two parts hydrogen, its structure is simple and strong. The hydrogen comes from the primordial fire of the Big Bang and is by far the most common element. Oxygen is created in the cores of large stars, along with carbon and nitrogen, as part of the CNO fusion cycle.

September 17, 2024September 20, 2024 by Matt Williams

Future Gravitational Wave Observatories Could See the Earliest Black Hole Mergers in the Universe

A simulation of two merging black holes. Credit: Simulating eXtreme Spacetimes (SXS) Project

In February 2016, scientists at the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO) confirmed they made the first-ever detection of gravitational waves (GWs). These events occur when massive objects like neutron stars and black holes merge, sending ripples through spacetime that can be detected millions (and even billions) of light-years away. Since the first event, more than 100 GW events have been confirmed by LIGO, the Advanced VIRGO collaboration, and the Kamioka Gravitational Wave Detector (KAGRA).

Moreover, scientists have found numerous applications for GW astronomy, from probing the interiors of supernovae and neutron stars to measuring the expansion rate of the Universe and learning what it looked like one minute after the Big Bang. In a recent study, an international team of astronomers proposed another application for binary black hole (BBH) mergers: using the earliest mergers in the Universe to probe the first generation of stars (Population III) in the Universe. By modeling how the events evolved, they determined what kind of GW signals the proposed Einstein Telescope (ET) could observe in the coming years.

June 9, 2024June 9, 2024 by Scott Alan Johnston

Carbon is Surprisingly Abundant in an Early Galaxy

Deep field image from JWST Credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, Brant Robertson (UC Santa Cruz), Ben Johnson (CfA), Sandro Tacchella (Cambridge), Phill Cargile (CfA)

The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has once again found evidence that the early universe was a far more complex place than we thought. This time, it has detected the signature of carbon atoms present in a galaxy that formed just 350 million years after the Big Bang – one of the earliest galaxies ever observed.

November 21, 2023November 21, 2023 by Evan Gough

A Galaxy Only 350 Million Years Old Had Surprising Amounts of Metal

The JWST has the power to see the most ancient galaxies in the Universe, as shown in this image of its first deep field. Now, astrophysicists have found carbon in one of these ancient galaxies. Image Credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, and STScI

Astrophysicists working with the JWST have found a surprising amount of metal in a galaxy only 350 million years after the Big Bang. How does that fit in with our understanding of the Universe?

July 27, 2023July 28, 2023 by Laurence Tognetti

Have We Seen the First Glimpse of Supermassive Dark Stars?

Three dark star candidates, JADES-GS-z13-0 (top), JADES-GS-z12-0 (middle), and JADES-GS-z11-0 (bottom) were originally identified as galaxies by the JWST Advanced Deep Extragalactic Survey (JADES) team. Recently, a team of researchers have hypothesized these candidates could be “dark stars,” which are theoretical objects far more massive and brighter than our sun, and allegedly powered by demolishing particles of dark matter. (Credit: NASA/European Space Agency)

A recent study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) examines what are known as dark stars, which are estimated to be much larger than our Sun, are hypothesized to have existed in the early universe, and are allegedly powered by the demolition of dark matter particles. This study was conducted using spectroscopic analysis from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), and more specifically, the JWST Advanced Deep Extragalactic Survey (JADES), and holds the potential to help astronomers better understand dark stars and the purpose of dark matter, the latter of which continues to be an enigma for the scientific community, as well as how it could have contributed to the early universe.

June 15, 2023June 15, 2023 by Brian Koberlein

More Evidence of Massive First Generation Stars

Artist's rendition of massive, luminous first-generation stars in the Universe. When they died, their supernova explosions produced dust. Credit: NAOC

A few days ago I wrote about the search for Population III stars. These stars were the first stars of the universe. Giant beasts hundreds of times more massive than the Sun, composed only of hydrogen and helium. These massive stars would have been very short-lived, exploding as brilliant supernovae in less than a million years. But Population III stars were so massive, their supernovae were uniquely different from the ones we see today, so our best way to find evidence of them is to look for their supernova remnants. And a recent study published in Nature may have found some.

June 9, 2023June 12, 2023 by Brian Koberlein

Has JWST Finally Found the First Stars in the Universe?

Artist's view of several Population III stars. Credit: NASA/WMAP Science Team

In astronomy, elements other than hydrogen and helium are called metals. While that might make your high-school chemistry teacher cringe, it makes sense for astronomers. The two lightest elements were the first to appear in the universe. They are the atomic remnants of the big bang and make up more than 99% of atoms in the universe. All the other elements, from carbon to iron to gold, were created through astrophysical processes. Things like nuclear fusion in stellar cores, supernova explosions, and collisions of white dwarfs and neutron stars.

May 31, 2023May 31, 2023 by Matt Williams

Here's How You Could Get Impossibly Large Galaxies in the Early Universe

The galaxy cluster SMACS0723, with the five galaxies selected for closer study. Credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI / Giménez-Arteaga et al. (2023), Peter Laursen (Cosmic Dawn Center).

One of the most interesting (and confounding) discoveries made by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is the existence of “impossibly large galaxies.” As noted in a previous article, these galaxies existed during the “Cosmic Dawn,” the period that coincided with the end of the “Cosmic Dark Age” (roughly 1 billion years after the Big Bang). This period is believed to hold the answers to many cosmological mysteries, not the least of which is what the earliest galaxies in the Universe looked like. But after Webb obtained images of these primordial galaxies, astronomers noticed something perplexing.

The galaxies were much larger than what the most widely accepted cosmological model predicts! Since then, astronomers and astrophysicists have been racking their brains to explain how these galaxies could have formed. Recently, a team of astrophysicists from The Hebrew University of Jerusalem Jerusalem published a theoretical model that addresses the mystery of these massive galaxies. According to their findings, the prevalence of special conditions in these galaxies (at the time) allowed highly-efficient rates of star formation without interference from other stars.

November 7, 2022November 7, 2022 by Brian Koberlein

Can JWST see Galaxies Made of Primordial Stars?

The distance of first generation stars. Credit: STScI

All stars are composed of mostly hydrogen and helium, but most stars also have measurable amounts of heavier elements, which astronomers lump into the category of “metals.” Our Sun has more metals than most stars because the nebula from which it formed was the remnant debris of earlier stars. These were in turn children of even earlier stars, and so on. Generally, each new generation of stars has a bit more metal than the last. The very first stars, those born from the primordial hydrogen and helium of the cosmos, had almost no metal in them. We’ve never seen one of these primordial stars, but with the power of the Webb and a bit of luck, we might catch a glimpse of them soon.

October 31, 2022February 17, 2023 by Matt Williams

Did Supermassive Black Holes Collapse Directly out of Giant Clouds of gas? It Could Depend on Magnetic Fields

This artist’s impression shows a possible seed for the formation of a supermassive black hole. Credit: NASA/CXC/M. Weiss

Roughly half a century ago, astronomers realized that the powerful radio source coming from the center of our galaxy (Sagittarius A*) was a “monster” black hole. Since then, they have found that supermassive black holes (SMBHs) reside at the center of most massive galaxies. This leads to what is known as Active Galactic Nuclei (AGN) or quasars, where the central region of a galaxy is so energetic that it outshines all of the stars in its galactic disk. In all that time, astronomers have puzzled over how these behemoths (which play a crucial role in galactic evolution) originated.

Astronomers suspect that the seeds that formed SMBHs were created from giant clouds of dust that collapsed without first becoming stars – aka. Direct Collapse Black Holes (DCBHs). However, the role of magnetic fields in the formation of DCBHs has remained unclear since none of the previous studies have been able to simulate the full accretion periods. To investigate this, an international team of astronomers ran a series of 3D cosmological magneto-hydrodynamic (MHD) simulations that accounted for DCBH formation and showed that magnetic fields grow with the accretion disks and stabilize them over time.