the womb of the big bang

From Scientific American: The First Stars in the Universe

And now back to your regularly scheduled science.

I've been reading a lot of these "story of a theory" type articles a lot in the past few days. I like them because they're easier to understand as a layperson, which I guess makes sense because they're actually stories that are coming from mainstream science magazines.

Anyway, this article is, just as it says, about the first stars in the universe. How they formed, how long ago, how massive they were. Answers: possibly small variations in density, between 100 and 250 million years after the Big Bang, and between 300 and 1000 solar masses.

all grown up and making carbon monoxide

From Scientific American: Did the universe mature at an early age?

More discoveries about the early universe, this time about two billion years after the Big Bang, or whatever beginning it was, which is about 11.5 billion years ago.

[A]stronomers announced that cosmic gas in that period, seen when backlit by a gamma-ray burst (a gigantic stellar explosion), contained molecular hydrogen and carbon monoxide—the first time astronomers have discovered molecules, as opposed to isolated atoms or ions, in the light of a gamma-ray burst. The molecules’ presence indicates that the galaxy where the burst occurred was nearly as chemically developed as the present-day Milky Way.

I'm curious now... theoretically, there was very, very little metal in the beginning of the universe, and so the earliest stars should have no metal (called Population III or metal-free stars, you can read about this at the Metallicity article are Wikipedia). Wikipedia says (I know Wikipedia can be a little dicey, but for basics like this I think it's ok) that "theory is divided on whether the first stars were very massive or not," but considering everything was just masses of light gases expanding, I think they must have been massive, and thus had very quick life cycles and pumped out a lot of new elements. And since this new evidence is showing that chemically, the universe is pretty similar 11.5 billion years ago as it is now, does that mean that there is the slim possibility that life could have formed anytime since then? I mean, life on Earth needed, what? Earth itself. So iron, nickel, other metals, and other heavier elements. Hydrogen and carbon monoxide means our basic organic building blocks were there - carbon and water. What else does life need?

I guess maybe a lack of galactic collisions. A little peace and quiet.

what came first?

From BBC News: Black holes 'preceded galaxies'

It was unclear whether black holes came first, helping create galaxies by pulling matter towards them, or whether they arose in already formed galaxies.

"It looks like the black holes came first," said Dr Chris Carilli, from the US National Radio Astronomy Observatory in Socorro, New Mexico, who took part in the study. "The evidence is piling up."

This is pretty interesting. The infancy of the universe is a mysterious time. I guess this makes sense, though. The universe was much smaller at around 1 billion years old. Maybe those metal-poor stars back then were the same way today's metal-rich stars are: lots of different sizes and masses, and some of them had to become black holes and then pull matter and stars to themselves as the universe expanded.