Virtually recreating the infancy of the Universe , astrophysicists at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory in the United States have concluded that the first stars emerged two by two .
The recipe for building a virtual universe is simple: it was enough to sprinkle a pinch of primordial gas and dark matter as they were distributed after the Big Bang , information that scientists have obtained by observing the cosmic background radiation. Starting from this scenario, astrophysicist Tom Abel and his colleagues ran simulations in five regions of the universe of hundreds of quadrillion cubic kilometers each, and allowed them to "evolve" for three weeks with the help of 64 processors. The results showed that when the first hot, massive stars began to appear, they were born as "twin stars."
"These stars could have evolved into black holes, which would have created gravitational waves," suggests astrophysicist Tom Abel, co-author of the study published in the journal Science . "Finding out how the first stars arose will help us understand what we see today, and even explain when and how some of the atoms that today make up the Earth or even our own bodies were formed, " adds his colleague Matthew Turk.
