A Cosmic Rosetta Stone: A computer simulation offers a detailed picture of how the first stars in the universe came into existence soon after the Big Bang, researchers say. Developed by Naoki Yoshida, who is currently at Nagoya University and expeted to take a project associate professor position at IPMU starting September 1st this year, and colleagues in the U.S. and Japan, this simulation of star formation reveals how pre-stellar gases would have evolved under the simpler physics of the early universe to form a protostar - the early stage of a massive star.
Understanding how these first primordial stars evolved is important because their formation and eventual explosion provided the seeds for subsequent stars to come into being. This new simulation also shows that this protostar would likely evolve into a massive star capable of synthesizing heavy elements, not just in later generations of stars, but soon after the Big Bang. More powerful computers, more experimental data, and extending the study to even larger range will be needed for further calculations and simulations. But these researchers hope to eventually extend this simulation to the point of nuclear reaction initiation - when a stellar object becomes a true star.
"Protostar Formation in the Early Universe," by N. Yoshida at Nagoya University in Nagoya, Japan; K. Omukai at National Astronomical Observatory of Japan in Tokyo, Japan; L. Hernquist at Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, MA.