Researchers may not be able to spot the universe's first stars in their telescopes yet, but that hasn't stopped them from taking a close look at how those fireballs emerged from the cold, dark days when the universe was young.New three-dimensional simulations published in Science show the series of steps by which the uneven fog of hydrogen atoms present before stars took shape would have clumped into protostars—dense balls of hydrogen just 1 percent the mass of the sun.
These stellar seeds would eventually grow into full-fledged stars larger than the sun, fusing hydrogen into helium and then the rest of the elements that make up modern stars, planets and life itself. The results help illuminate the "cosmic dark ages" during the first billion years after the big bang that kicked off the universe some 13.7 billion years ago. ...
Astrophysicist Volker Bromm of the University of Texas at Austin wrote in an editorial accompanying the study that the combination of JWST with other experiments and improved simulations "promises to close the final gap in our cosmic worldview in the decade ahead."
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