A new study by an international team of astrophysicists has shown that planets, including potentially habitable ones, could have formed as early as 200 million years after the Big Bang — long before the first galaxies emerged.
This discovery overturns existing ideas about the time and conditions under which planets and life in the Universe emerged.
The first stars in the Universe, known as Population III stars, exploded as supernovae, enriching the cosmos with the heavy elements needed to form planets. These explosions created conditions for the formation of dense clouds that subsequently collapsed into protoplanetary disks. In such disks, as simulations have shown, planetesimals — the building blocks of planets — could have formed.
Using computer modeling, scientists have recreated the process of planet formation as a result of a supernova explosion of a star weighing 200 solar masses. The explosion resulted in a cloud of gas and dust, which then collapsed into a protoplanetary disk. In this disk, at distances from 0.46 to 1.66 astronomical units from the star, planetesimals with a total mass of about five Earth masses formed.
