Early supernovae may have seeded rocky worlds just 100 million years after the Big Bang
New simulations suggest that solid, water-rich material for Earth-like planets could have existed only 100 million years after the universe began.
A team from the University of Portsmouth used computer simulations to explore how the earliest supernovae enriched the primordial gas with carbon, oxygen and iron. Their results indicate that pair-instability supernovae could have injected massive amounts of heavy elements into nearby clouds, allowing gravity to create rotating disks around young, low-mass stars. In one case, a disk around a star 70 % as massive as the Sun accumulated enough solid material to form multiple Earth-mass planetesimals at a distance similar to Earth’s orbit.
The same disk retained a significant quantity of water, only a few times less than that present when our Solar System formed. These findings push back the timeline for possible rocky, potentially habitable planet formation to just 100 million years after the Big Bang, far earlier than previous estimates. The study appears in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.
Why it matters
It shows that conditions for Earth-like planets may have existed far earlier in cosmic history than previously thought.
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