Stars from the First Supernovae

Funded in part by: National Science Foundation Award: ACI-1445176 
The Centrality of Advance Dgitally Enabled Science: CADENS 

The simulation shows the early formation of the network of filaments and halos known as the Cosmic Web.  The bright bubbles show the locations of newly formed primordial stars.  These primordial stars were much more massive than the stars we observe today.  They lived briefly, shined brightly, and exploded in supernovae that destroyed their host galaxies.

We then zoom in to see the process of primordial star birth, life, and death up close.  About 145 million years after the Big Bang, we see a primordial star form in a galaxy about one ten-millionth the size of the Milky Way.  The orange shading shows the temperature of the gas and we can see how the radiation from the star quickly escapes the galaxy and heats up its surroundings.  Within about 4 million years, the star explodes, creating the first elements heavier than Helium, such as Carbon, Oxygen, and Iron.  These "metals" as astronomers call them, are shown in green.  The metals are dispersed into intergalactic space by the supernova and will eventually be reincorporated into new stars.  After this first explosion, we zoom in further to see what happens when a supernova goes off right next to a proto-galaxy that has yet to form stars of its own.  The metals (green) wash over the proto-galaxy (blue) and mix into the star-forming gas.  We now zoom in on the gas-cloud in this proto-galaxy as it collapses to form new stars.  This gas is now enriched with heavy elements that will drastically change how the gas behaves as it collapses to form stars.  Instead of remaining a single, massive star (like when primordial stars form), the presence of heavy elements allows the gas-cloud to fragment into many smaller stars.  The movie ends showing the fragmented star-forming cloud on a scale of about 100 AU across, about twice the distance from the sun to Pluto.  These fragments will become the first stars to resemble those we see today.

GRANT: ACI-1514580
COMPUTED AT: NCSA Blue Waters
DATA SIZE: 40 TB
DATA RESOLUTION: 1024x1024

Box size: 500 kpc/h (~700 kpc) comoving

Grid: 512^3 root grid cells/particles + 2 nested levels of refinement

Dark matter particle mass: 1.5 Msun
25 additional AMR levels (27 total) for a max spatial resolution of ~2 AU

SPATIAL SCALE: 40,000 parsecs

TIME SCALE:
Initial redshift: z = 180 (~7 Myr after Big Bang)
Final redshift: z = 16.625 (~240 Myr after Big Bang)
Total time scale: ~233 Myr