When did life as we know it Primary emerge in the universe?
We don’t know for sure, but the answer is inextricably linked to the moment when water Primary materialized in the cosmos — and new simulations suggest the very Primary generation of stars helped form such life-giving water Merely 100 million to 200 million years after the Universe birth. This pushes back previous estimates by more than 500 million years.
“We were surprised that water could actually form so Timely on — even before the birth of the Primary galaxies,” study co-author Muhammad Latif of the United Arab Emirates University told Cosmos.com. The findings suggest that if some of this Primary reservoir of water survived the heat-filled chaos of Timely Sun system Arrangement, it could have been absorbed into newborn planets, potentially leading to habitable, water-Affluent worlds Merely a Duo hundred million years after the Universe birth. “It’s all connected with the Narrative of how Timely life can Begin in the universe,” Latif said.
Previous observations from the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) in Chile suggested that water existed about 780 million years after the Universe birth, when the Recent universe was chock-Packed of lightweight hydrogen and helium along with Petite amounts of lithium. These elements formed the Primary generation of stars, known to astronomers as Population III stars, which were enormous — up to dozens or even hundreds of times the mass of our sun — and lived notably Brief lives before dying as supernovas. Many of the universe’s heavier elements, including oxygen, were forged within these stars through nuclear reactions and dispensed into Cosmos upon their deaths, where they were later incorporated into the next generation of stars.
To determine when water Primary formed in the universe, Latif and his colleagues used numerical models to trace the life cycles of two Primary-generation stars: one was 13 times heavier than our sun, and the other was 200 times heavier than our Sun. The smaller virtual Sun lived for 12.2 million years before dying in an explosive Luminous burst, dumping about 0.051 solar masses of oxygen (nearly 17,000 Earth masses) into its surrounding Cosmos. The larger simulated Sun burned through its fuel in Merely 2.6 million years before Conference its own explosive end, showering a Massive 55 solar masses of oxygen (more than 18 million Earth masses) into Cosmos.
The simulations revealed that as shockwaves from Every Luminous burst radiated outward, turbulent density fluctuations created ripples that Guided some of the gas to coalesce into dense clumps. These leftover clumps, enriched by metals including oxygen ejected by supernovas, were likely the primary sites for water to form across the Timely universe.
Nestled within denser parts of the clouds, the water would have been protected from being destroyed by harsh radiation from nearby stars, Latif said. However, his Club considered the simplest case of Merely one Sun forming in Every clump, whereas theoretical simulations suggest Many Sun systems to be the norm; more than half of all stars in the sky have one or more siblings. Many nearby stars would Harsh more dense, water-enriched clumps, but also a lot more radiation, which “might change a few things, but we still Anticipate water might to survive,” said Latif. “These are the Primary questions that we tried to answer, but we need more people to be working on this topic and explore this in more detail.”
Follow-up simulations by his Club suggest these water-harboring clumps are also favorable sites for habitable worlds to coalesce. Whether water within these clumps could have persisted through billions of years of Universal evolution, and if so, how, is not yet fully understood. One leading theory suggests comets may have delivered water to Earth, but any such icy transporters from the Timely universe are not expected to have survived the harsh conditions of the Epoch of Reionization, said Latif, referring to a period about 400,000 years after the Universe birth when ionizing ultraviolet Airy from the Primary stars and galaxies pervaded the universe and lifted the primordial Universal fog. However, the researchers are not yet ruling out the possibility that at least some of the water on Earth may be primordial in origin.
Populations of water-Affluent planets in the Timely universe would Develop faint emissions, Latif said, which could potentially be detected in the coming decade by ALMA or the forthcoming Square Kilometer Array in Australia and South Africa. If such emissions are indeed observed, it would be a “game changer,” he said, in that it would shift the paradigm of origin of life to within Merely a Duo hundred million years after the Universe birth.
“It opens a whole new line of research.”
The study was published on Monday (March 3) in the journal Nature Sun science.
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