First stars may have formed in a storm of gas

New simulations suggest turbulence in primordial gas helped shape the universe’s first stars.

The Universe’s Very First Stars Reveal An Unexpected Cosmic Chaos

A new set of high‑resolution simulations offers a vivid look at how Population III stars formed in the early universe. Led by Ke‑Jung Chen of the Institute of Astronomy and Astrophysics at Academia Sinica in Taiwan, the study used the GIZMO code and data from the IllustrisTNG Project to push resolution by roughly 100,000 times through particle splitting. The effort shows supersonic turbulence in primordial gas clouds caused the gas to fragment into multiple dense clumps, rather than collapse in a single, orderly fashion. One clump reached the Jeans instability and collapsed into a star of about eight solar masses, with accretion that was highly anisotropic and shaped by tidal forces from the assembling dark matter halo.

This work reframes the dawn of starlight. Turbulence becomes a central driver of early star birth, linking the physics of tiny gas clouds to the grand assembly of cosmic structure. If gas chaos naturally limits how massive Population III stars can be, it helps explain why the chemical fingerprints expected from certain stellar explosions are not found in the oldest stars we can study today. Yet the findings rely on complex simulations with many uncertain inputs, and they must be tested against other models and indirect observations. The study bridges scales from parsec‑sized gas flows to halo formation, offering a new path to understand how the first light emerged and shaped subsequent galaxy evolution.

Highlights

The dawn of light keeps teaching us, one simulation at a time.