Formation of the First Stars

Understand

Understanding the formation of the first stars is one of the frontier topics in modern astrophysics and cosmology.

• Their emergence signaled the end of the cosmic dark ages, a few hundred million years after the Big Bang, leading to a fundamental transformation of the early Universe through the production of ionizing photons and the initial enrichment with heavy chemical elements.
• We here review the state of our knowledge, separating the well understood elements of our emerging picture from those where more work is required.
• Primordial star formation is unique in that its initial conditions can be directly inferred from the Lambda Cold Dark Matter (LCDM) model of cosmological structure formation.