The second important difference is that the protogalaxies would have contained no significant amounts of any elements besides hydrogen and helium. The big bang produced hydrogen and helium, but most of the heavier elements are created only by the thermonuclear fusion reactions in stars, so they would not have been present before the first stars had formed. Astronomers use the term “metals” for all these heavier elements. The young metal-rich stars in the Milky Way are called Population I stars, and the old metal-poor stars are called Population II stars; following this terminology, the stars with no metals at all—the very first generation—are sometimes called Population III stars.
In the absence of metals, the physics of the first star-forming systems would have been much simpler than that of present-day molecular gas clouds. Furthermore, the cosmological models can provide, in principle, a complete description of the initial conditions that preceded the first generation of stars. In contrast, the stars that arise from molecular gas clouds are born in complex environments that have been altered by the effects of previous star formation. Therefore, scientists may find it easier to model the formation of the first stars than to model how stars form at present. In any case, the problem is an appealing one for theoretical study, and several research groups have used computer simulations to portray the formation of the earliest stars.
A group consisting of Tom Abel, Greg Bryan and Michael L. Norman (now at Pennsylvania State University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of California at San Diego, respectively) has made the most realistic simulations. In collaboration with Paolo Coppi of Yale University, we have done simulations based on simpler assumptions but intended to explore a wider range of possibilities. Toru Tsuribe, now at Osaka University in Japan, has made similar calculations using more powerful computers. Fumitaka Nakamura and Masayuki Umemura (now at Niigata and Tsukuba universities in Japan, respectively) have worked with a more idealized simulation, but it has still yielded instructive results. Although these studies differ in various details, they have all produced similar descriptions of how the earliest stars might have been born.
Let There Be Light! The simulations show that the primordial gas clouds would typically form at the nodes of a small-scale filamentary network and then begin to contract because of their gravity. Compression would heat the gas to temperatures above 1,000 kelvins. Some hydrogen atoms would pair up in the dense, hot gas, creating trace amounts of molecular hydrogen. The hydrogen molecules would then start to cool the densest parts of the gas by emitting infrared radiation after they collide with hydrogen atoms. The temperature in the densest parts would drop to about 200 to 300 kelvins, reducing the gas pressure in these regions and hence allowing them to contract into gravitationally bound clumps.
This cooling plays an essential role in allowing the ordinary matter in the primordial system to separate from the dark matter. The cooling hydrogen settles into a flattened rotating configuration that is clumpy and filamentary and possibly shaped like a disk. But because the darkmatter particles would not emit radiation or lose energy, they would remain scattered in the primordial cloud. Thus, the star-forming system would come to resemble a miniature galaxy, with a disk of ordinary matter and a halo of dark matter. Inside the disk, the densest clumps of gas would continue to contract, and eventually some of them would undergo a runaway collapse and become stars.
The first star-forming clumps were much warmer than the molecular gas clouds in which most stars currently form. Dust grains and molecules containing heavy elements cool the present-day clouds much more efficiently to temperatures of only about 10 kelvins. The minimum mass that a clump of gas must have to collapse under its gravity is called the Jeans mass, which is proportional to the square of the gas temperature and inversely proportional to the square root of the gas pressure. The first star-forming systems would have had pressures similar to those of present-day molecular clouds. But because the temperatures of the first collapsing gas clumps were almost 30 times higher than those of molecular clouds, their Jeans mass would have been almost 1,000 times larger.
In molecular clouds in the nearby part of the Milky Way, the Jeans mass is roughly equal to the mass of the sun, and the masses of the prestellar clumps observed in these clouds are about the same. If we scale up by a factor of almost 1,000, we can estimate that the masses of the first star-forming clumps would have been about 500 to 1,000 solar masses. In agreement with this prediction, all the computer simulations mentioned above showed the formation of clumps with masses of several hundred solar masses or more.
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Add Commentubiquitous bright blue 1-12 pixel sources on darker 3D fractal web in five 2007.09.06 IR and visible light HUDF images, Nor Pirzkal, Sangeeta Malhotra, James E Rhoads, Chun Xu, -- might be clusters of earliest hypernovae in recent cosmological simulations: Rich Murray 2008.08.17
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Sunday, August 17, 2008
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The 5 closeups are about 2.2x2.2 arc-seconds wide and high, about 70x70 pixels.
The HUDF is 315x315 arc-seconds, with N at top and E at left.
Each side has 10,500x10,500 pixels at 0.03 arc-second per pixel.
Click on All Sizes and select Original to view the highest resolution image of 3022x2496 pixels, which can be also be conveniently seen directly at their Zoomable image:
www.spacetelescope.org/images/html/zoomable/heic0714a.html
Notable in the deep background of the five closeups are ubiquitous bright blue sources, presumably extremely hot ultraviolet before redshifting, 1 to a dozen or so pixels, as single or short lines of spots, and a few irregular tiny blobs, probably, as predicted in many recent simulations, the earliest massive, short-lived hypernovae, GRBs with jets at various angles to our line of sight, expanding bubbles, earliest molecular and dust clouds with light echoes and bursts of star formation, and first small dwarf galaxies, always associated with a subtle darker 3D random fractal mesh of filaments of H and He atomic gases.
As a scientific layman, I am grateful for specific cogent, civil feedback, based on the details readily visible in images in the public domain.
www.spacetelescope.org/images/html/heic0714a.html
Hubble and Spitzer Uncover Smallest Galaxy Building Blocks
notable bright blue tiny sources on darker 3D fractal web in HUDF VLT ESO 28 images from 506 galaxies, z about 6 , RJ Bouwens, GD Illingworth,
JP Blakeslee, M Franx 2008.02.04 draft 36 page: Rich Murray 2008.08.17
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Sunday, August 17, 2008
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bright blue 1-4 pixel sources on darker 3D fractal web in IR and visible light
HUDF images -- might be the clusters of earliest hypernovae in the Naoki Yoshida and Lars Hernquist simulation: Rich Murray 2008.07.31
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Thursday, July 31, 2008
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Rich Murray, MA Room For All rmforall@comcast.net
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Thankyou! Excellent in content and writing style. Fascinating even to this layman.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisKlaus Jaritz
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Please read my web-site www.kosmonom.dk and you will know Peder's law and you may print as much of the articles as you like with mentioning of the origin
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