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Science 14 September 2007:
Vol. 317. no. 5844, pp. 1527 - 1530
DOI: 10.1126/science.1146676
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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

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THIS ARTICLE HAS BEEN CITED BY OTHER ARTICLES:
Protostar Formation in the Early Universe.
N. Yoshida, K. Omukai, and L. Hernquist (2008)
Science 321, 669-671
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