The early universe was crammed with stars 10,000 times the size of our sun, new study suggests

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.

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. In the modern day universe, dense balls of matter quickly collapse to form stars. But that’s because the modern universe has something that the early universe lacked: a lot of elements heavier than hydrogen and helium. These elements are very efficient at radiating energy away. This allows the dense clumps to shrink very rapidly, collapsing to high enough densities to trigger nuclear fusion – the process that powers stars by combining lighter elements into heavier ones. But the only way to get heavier elements in the first place is through that same nuclear fusion process. Multiple generations of stars forming, fusing, and dying enriched the cosmos to its present state. Without the ability to rapidly release heat, the first generation of stars had to form under much different, and much more difficult, conditions. Read more...

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