Evolution of the universe; early giant stars (Introduction)

by David Turell , Wednesday, February 22, 2023, 16:05 (638 days ago) @ David Turell

A new study:

https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/#trash/FMfcgzGrcjRLktnZNCGjDMKTkbkWrWpg

"When the universe's first stars emerged from the cosmic dark ages, they ballooned to 10,000 times the mass of Earth's sun, new research suggests.

"The first stars in the cosmos may have topped out at over 10,000 times the mass of the sun, roughly 1,000 times bigger than the biggest stars alive today, a new study has found.

"Nowadays, the biggest stars are 100 solar masses. But the early universe was a far more exotic place, filled with mega-giant stars that lived fast and died very, very young, the researchers found.

"And once these doomed giants died out, conditions were never right for them to form again.

"More than 13 billion years ago, not long after the Big Bang, the universe had no stars. There was nothing more than a warm soup of neutral gas, almost entirely made up of hydrogen and helium. Over hundreds of millions of years, however, that neutral gas began to pile up into increasingly dense balls of matter. This period is known as the cosmic Dark Ages.***

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"The researchers found that a complex web of interactions preceded the first star formation. Neutral gas began to collect and clump together. Hydrogen and helium released a little bit of heat, which allowed clumps of the neutral gas to slowly reach higher densities.

"But high-density clumps became very warm, producing radiation that broke apart the neutral gas and prevented it from fragmenting into many smaller clumps. That means stars made from these clumps can become incredibly large.

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"Those first stars weren’t just any normal fusion factories. They were gigantic clumps of neutral gas igniting their fusion cores all at once, skipping the stage where they fragment into small pieces. The resulting stellar mass was huge.

"Those first stars would have been incredibly bright and would have lived extremely short lives, less than a million years. (Stars in the modern universe can live billions of years). After that, they would have died in furious bursts of supernova explosions.

"Those explosions would have carried the products of the internal fusion reactions – elements heavier than hydrogen and helium – that then seeded the next round of star formation. But now contaminated by heavier elements, the process couldn’t repeat itself, and those monsters would never again appear on the cosmic scene."

Comment: first the Big Bang and then an evolutionary process to produce the current universe. This is the first instance of evidence God prefers to create by evolutionary processes. The primordial Earth evolved from a dust disc around the Sun. First life helped evolve the Earth into its present form. And finally, life evolved. Strong evidence God prefers to evolve His creations.