
TL;DR
This paper reviews current understanding of the formation of the first stars, highlighting the standard model, recent modifications, and potential observational tests, emphasizing their role in ending the cosmic dark ages and enriching the universe.
Contribution
It provides a comprehensive overview of primordial star formation, including the standard model, recent developments like disk fragmentation, and extensions involving magnetic fields and dark matter effects.
Findings
First stars were predominantly massive.
Protostellar disks can fragment into binaries or multiples.
Magnetic fields and dark matter influence star formation processes.
Abstract
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. Combined with gas cooling that is mediated via molecular hydrogen, one can robustly identify the regions of primordial star formation, the so-called minihalos, having total masses of ~10^6 M_sun…
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Taxonomy
TopicsStellar, planetary, and galactic studies · Astrophysics and Star Formation Studies · Gamma-ray bursts and supernovae
