By Ron Cowen
Talk about glimmers from the past. Some of the universe’s first stars may still be shining in the Milky Way 13.4 billion years after they formed, new simulations suggest.
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The study, reported online February 3 in Science and posted at arXiv.org on January 28, contradicts the prevailing view that the first stars were all behemoths that burned brightly and died out in a few million years.
In their simulations, Paul Clark of the University of Heidelberg in Germany and his colleagues showed that gas clouds in the early universe could have forged several stellar embryos rather than just one. Clark, along with Thomas Greif of the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics in Garching, Germany, and other collaborators confirm that finding in an article posted at arXiv.org on January 31.