Journal
SCIENCE
Volume 331, Issue 6020, Pages 1040-1042Publisher
AMER ASSOC ADVANCEMENT SCIENCE
DOI: 10.1126/science.1198027
Keywords
-
Categories
Funding
- Baden-Wurttemberg Stiftung [P-LS-SPII/18]
- Heidelberg University, German Excellence Initiative
- NSF [AST-0708795, AST-1009928]
- NASA [NNX 08-AL43G, 09-AJ33G]
- Texas Advanced Computing Center [AST090003]
- Division Of Astronomical Sciences
- Direct For Mathematical & Physical Scien [1009928] Funding Source: National Science Foundation
Ask authors/readers for more resources
The very first stars to form in the universe heralded an end to the cosmic dark ages and introduced new physical processes that shaped early cosmic evolution. Until now, it was thought that these stars lived short, solitary lives, with only one extremely massive star, or possibly a very wide binary system, forming in each dark-matter minihalo. Here we describe numerical simulations that show that these stars were, to the contrary, often members of tight multiple systems. Our results show that the disks that formed around the first young stars were unstable to gravitational fragmentation, possibly producing small binary and higher-order systems that had separations as small as the distance between Earth and the Sun.
Authors
I am an author on this paper
Click your name to claim this paper and add it to your profile.
Reviews
Recommended
No Data Available