Water in the Very Early Universe
Okay, now this is a really interesting result.
Abundant water from primordial supernovae at cosmic dawn
The claim is that the hypothetical Population III stars, the very earliest generation of stars in the universe, could have seeded the interstellar medium with vast amounts of water. This might have led to the formation of rocky, water-bearing planets – possible abodes for life – as early as 200 million years after the Big Bang. Long before galaxies really started taking shape, certainly long before the Milky Way began to form.
Take it with a grain of salt, of course. We don’t have proof that Population III stars of the kind modeled here ever actually existed. Still, this suggests we might be able to push the start date for biological life in the universe back by a lot. I may need to rethink the deep back-story for the Human Destiny setting . . .
2 thoughts on “Water in the Very Early Universe”
The simulations show that large amounts of “metals” were also created. Would Population III stars live long enough for complex to form?
You should out this recent XKCD comic about exoplanets. https://xkcd.com/3103/
The first big Population III stars, probably not. Their stable lifespans were in the low millions of years, and they probably didn’t have enough metals for planets anyway.
My guess is that the supernovae resulting from that first generation of stars would have given rise to knots in the interstellar medium, that would have in turn generated smaller stars, just like supernova shock waves sometimes set off new star formation in the modern Galaxy. It’s plausible that those smaller next-generation stars existed, since we’ve found possible examples still around today.
Those smaller stars might have been long-lived enough to foster biological life, if they got enough water and metals for planets.