First supernovae may have seeded rocky planet building blocks 100 million years after the Big Bang

The study from the University of Portsmouth suggests that the building blocks of rocky planets may have formed 100 million years after the Big Bang, long before the first galaxies existed. The research indicates that the first planetary ingredients could have been created around low-mass, long-lived stars in the debris of the first cosmic explosions. These explosions, known as "Pop III supernovae," scattered heavy elements needed for planet formation. The findings suggest that the conditions for planet formation may have existed much earlier than previously thought.

• The study was led by Dr. Daniel Whalen and his Ph.D. student Chris Jessop.
• A particular type of Pop III supernova, called a pair-instability supernova, can blast out more than 100 times the sun's mass in heavy elements.
• The simulations found one such disk around a young star about 70% as massive as the sun, containing enough solid material to create several Earth masses' worth of planetary building blocks at roughly the same distance from the star as Earth is from the sun.
• The disk also contained substantial amounts of water, similar to what was available when our solar system formed.

The study has been accepted by The Astrophysical Journal Letters and is currently published on the arXiv preprint server. The findings raise the intriguing question of whether potentially habitable worlds could have formed earlier in the universe's history.

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