the first object

And yet they're still missing the point.


Researchers may have found cosmic Rosetta stone
By Randolph E. Schmid, Associated Press via USA Today, August 1, 2008

Star light, star bright. The first star grew fast, but began slight. The first cosmological object formed in the universe was a tiny protostar with a mass of about 1% of our sun, according to U.S. and Japanese researchers who spent years developing a complex computer simulation of what it was like after the Big Bang that formed the universe.

This protostar was surrounded by a giant mass of gas and it grew to 100 times the sun's mass over about 10,000 years, according to Naoki Yoshida of Nagoya University in Japan. That is very rapid growth on a cosmic scale.

"The first stars were very different from stars like the sun," explained Harvard astronomy professor Lars Hernquist, co-author of a paper describing the findings in Friday's issue of the journal Science.

While the sun is mostly hydrogen, it also contains oxygen and carbon, he said. The early stars were primarily hydrogen and helium, and were much more luminous and had a shorter life.

"These differences have important implications for what happened afterward," he said at a teleconference. . . .

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