1st supernovas may have flooded the early universe with water — making life possible just 100 million years after the Big Bang

[Admin]

Black holes that have been obscured by clouds of dust still emit infrared light, enabling astronomers to spot them for the very first time

1st supernovas may have flooded the early universe with water — making life possible just 100 million years after the Big Bang : Read more

 

[contrarian]

While water is certainly a requirement for life, a considerable number of other elements and compounds are also required, not the least are silicates, also formed by reacting with oxygen. These compounds, water and silicates, are likely the two most essential for the appearance of life - water for obvious reasons, and silicates because they are the primary component of planetary formation. Silicates are likely also essential for their unique chemical features at the molecular level in an aqueous environment, features that very likely initiated abiogenesis, and its follow-on life forms.

But many other elements are also required, and most of these are also made by either fusion (carbon, etc.), or by nucleosynthesis. With many stars burning and going out in core collapse supernova in those first few hundred million years noted in the article, you should be getting a lot of everything formed in the early years following the BB.

This all relates to how quickly star systems with stable planets for evolving life could form once their essential components had been formed and dispersed. Certainly it must be longer than 200-300 million years after the BB.

After all, it likely took the proto-Earth at least a hundred million years to form from the 'solar nebula', and probably double that to complete its interaction(s) which formed the moon before stabilizing to its present mass. From these observations alone, it would seem that the first habitable planets would have required far longer than it took for all this water to appear. And this despite the higher mass densities of all these elements and compounds in that time frame.

Anyone aware of any rational studies predicting when the first habitable planets might have formed? Perhaps in the first billion years surely seems probable.

 

[Unclear Engineer]

Besides the availability of the necessary chemicals, I wonder what the environments of planets are like when they are in a galaxy that is a quasar. Especially if it is an early "small" galaxy so that most stars are in closer proximity to the quasar emissions. At least life on the surface would probably need .

 

[contrarian]

Besides the availability of the necessary chemicals,

This was all the post considered. It was not about habitability, but when the conditions for abiogensis might occur following the BB. Obviously heavy radiation plays a role in the viability of life regardless of circustances, but this is not related to the issue at hand - which is simply the formation of planetary bodies that could give rise to life at some point in their history due to their ideal chemical compositions.

 

[George²]

This was all the post considered. It was not about habitability, but when the conditions for abiogensis might occur following the BB. Obviously heavy radiation plays a role in the viability of life regardless of circustances, but this is not related to the issue at hand - which is simply the formation of planetary bodies that could give rise to life at some point in their history due to their ideal chemical compositions.

Therefore, after ignoring the other necessary conditions, this article is a completely useless waste of mental energy in the name of the record of when the earliest something could have been. And that's assuming that there was a "big bang" and a beginning.

 

[Unclear Engineer]

I don't see much "news" in pointing out that the first massive stars are presumed to have made the elements needed for water. Isn't that the basic theory all along? It seems that "news" would be something to the contrary.

The other part of the "news" is how soon after the "big Bang" those stars are presumed to have developed, run their lives, and gone supernova, releasing those newly created elements into the rest of space, so that planets could form from the "ashes" of the supernovas. But, we really only have theories for what the timelines were for those events, and those theories seem to be challenged at least with respect to timing, every time we start using a bigger telescope.

So, I'll ask, do we think we will ever develop the technology to "see" the population 3 stars and their environments to be able to verify that they were created from nearly pure hydrogen and that there were no other elements in their vicinities during their lifetimes?