Year: 2026
Type: article
Abstract: Primordial, or Population III (Pop III), supernovae (SNe) were the first nucleosynthetic engines in the Universe, forging the heavy elements required for the later formation of planets and life. Past studies suggest that the rise of planet formation was gradual, and did not peak until about half of the present age of the Universe, after cosmic mean metallicities exceeded a critical value. However, Pop III pair-instability (PI) SNe, which can eject over 100 M ⊙ of metals, locally enriched gas to metallicities of up to 1 Z ⊙ at Cosmic Dawn, just 100 Myr after the Big Bang. Here we show that planetesimals, the precursors of terrestrial planets, can form around low-mass, long-lived stars in the debris of such explosions, before the first galaxies and far earlier than previously thought. We modeled the collapse of a dense core with a Jeans mass of just 1–2 M ⊙ from a PI SN remnant and found that a protoplanetary disk formed with several Earth masses of planetesimals 0.5–1.0 au from their parent star, within its water snow line. The disk has H 2 O mass fractions that are only a factor of a few less than in the solar system today, raising the possibility of enrichment of the first planets in the Universe with water in direct analogy to Earth in the solar system.
Language: English
Subfield: Astronomy and Astrophysics
Field: Physics and Astronomy
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: gold
Estimated APC paid: $2,400
Awards: G1954028717, G201661023, G3739450595, Star cluster formation in the early universe: from PopIII clusters to globular clusters, 近傍宇宙での低金属量星団形成, G8554265445, Modeling of star formation on massively parallel computers, The nature of the first galaxies and the origin of supermassive black holes as revealed by the star cluster formation process in the early universe, STFC Portsmouth 2018 DTP, STFC Portsmouth 2019 DTP
OpenAlex ID: W7203832432