Habitable planets may have formed in the early days of the universe

The worlds with liquid water may have formed only 200 million years after Big Bang, from the rest of the first supernoves.

Conditions in the primitive universe may have allowed formation of rocky planets with water much earlier than expectedpotentially allowing life to start too early.

According to the astrophysicists who study the primitive universe think that planet formation only began seriously when Supernovas released enough heavy elements to form plansimalthe construction blocks of the rocky planets, around the stars.

Our sun and its planets emerged when the universe had about 9 billion years and the oldest known planet developed billion million years after the beginning of the universe life.

Daniel Whalenfrom the University of Portsmouth, the UK, and his colleagues suggest that planet formation may have occurred long earlier, just 200 million years after Big Bang and before some of the first galaxies were started to form. The article was in arXiv.

According to their theory, planets may have formed around stars smaller than our sun, born of the remains of powerful old supernovae, called Pairs instability supernovae.

According to the investigators, these explosionswhich involved stars with hundreds of times the sun’s mass and which were the first to form in the universe, may have released enough heavy elements to form planets.

This would have included large amounts of oxygen, which means that the resulting stars could also contain a considerable amount of water, almost comparable to the amount of water in our solar system.

“The ones thus formed among the first generation of stars in the universe, before the appearance of the first galaxies,” the researchers say.

Your barstow, From Open University, the United Kingdom, says that if the platesimal ones could form so soon in the universe, then “there is no reason to expect that there would be no planets.”

However, their habitability could depend on the presence of gaseous giants, which could be crucial to limit the amount of impacts on rocky planets than those could make unhapbleas well as to drive asteroids and water comets to these worlds, says Barstow.

“I don’t think giant planets could form in this environment” so soon in the universe, says Barstow. “I don’t think there is enough material.”

Another open question It is knowing whether the rocky planets in the primitive universe could retain atmospheres, taking into account the eruptions and expected activity of nearby stars.

Richard AmslowFrom the University of Cambridge, he says that perhaps we can test the idea that the planets have formed anytime soon looking for old planets in the orbit of current stars with low amount of heavy elements, similar to the low mass stars of the primitive universe.

“See proofs of the formation of these planets It would be a very cool thing, ”says Amslow. “This would encourage research to understand how planet formation can occur in difficult circumstances“.

In fact, seeing planets around stars in the first 200 million years of the universe would be much more difficult andXigiria telescopes much more powerful than those currently in operation. But the idea is “definitely interesting and deserves more research“Barstow concludes.