Habitable Worlds Formed at Cosmic Dawn

Primordial supernovae were the first, great nucleosynthetic engines in the Universe, forging the elements required for the later formation of planets and life.

Here we show that planetesimals, the precursors of terrestrial planets, formed around low-mass stars in the debris of the first cosmic explosions 200 Myr after the Big Bang, before the first galaxies and far earlier than previously thought.

A dense core in one of these explosions collapsed to a protoplanetary disk in which several Earth masses of planetesimals formed 0.46 – 1.66 AU from their parent 0.7 M_⊙ star, where equilibrium temperatures varied from 269 K to 186 K, in water mass fractions that were only a factor of a few less than in the Solar System today.

Habitable worlds thus formed among the first generation of stars in the Universe, before the advent of the first galaxies.

Daniel J. Whalen, Eduard I. Vorobyov, Muhammad A. Latif, Christopher Jessop, Ryoki Matsukoba, Takashi Hosokawa, Alexander M. Skliarevskii, Devesh Nandal, Nicholas P. Herrington

Comments: 32 pages, 15 figures
Subjects: Astrophysics of Galaxies (astro-ph.GA)
Cite as: arXiv:2501.08375 [astro-ph.GA] (or arXiv:2501.08375v1 [astro-ph.GA] for this version)
https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2501.08375
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Submission history
From: Daniel Whalen
[v1] Tue, 14 Jan 2025 19:00:00 UTC (10,863 KB)
https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.08375
Astrobiology