Note to users. If you're seeing this message, it means that your browser cannot find this page's style/presentation instructions -- or possibly that you are using a browser that does not support current Web standards. Find out more about why this message is appearing, and what you can do to make your experience of our site the best it can be.
Invitrogen Webinar

Site Tools

  • AAAS
  • Subscribe
  • Feedback

Site Search

Search Advanced

Science 14 September 2007:
Vol. 317. no. 5844, pp. 1527 - 1530
DOI: 10.1126/science.1146676
Prev | Table of Contents | Next

Reports

Lighting the Universe with Filaments

Liang Gao1* and Tom Theuns1,2

The first stars in the universe form when chemically pristine gas heats as it falls into dark-matter potential wells, cools radiatively because of the formation of molecular hydrogen, and becomes self-gravitating. Using supercomputer simulations, we demonstrated that the stars' properties depend critically on the currently unknown nature of the dark matter. If the dark-matter particles have intrinsic velocities that wipe out small-scale structure, then the first stars form in filaments with lengths on the order of the free-streaming scale, which can be ~1020 meters (~3 kiloparsecs, corresponding to a baryonic mass of ~107 solar masses) for realistic "warm dark matter" candidates. Fragmentation of the filaments forms stars with a range of masses, which may explain the observed peculiar element abundance pattern of extremely metal-poor stars, whereas coalescence of fragments and stars during the filament's ultimate collapse may seed the supermassive black holes that lurk in the centers of most massive galaxies.

1 Institute for Computational Cosmology, Durham University, South Road, Durham DH1 3LE, UK.
2 Department of Physics, University of Antwerp, Groenenborgerlaan 171, B-2020 Antwerpen, Belgium.

* To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: liang.gao{at}durham.ac.uk

Read the Full Text

ADVERTISEMENT
Click Me!

ADVERTISEMENT
Click Me!

To Advertise     Find Products