Science 321, 669–671 (2008)

Observations of distant quasars and galaxies show that there was light when the Universe was less than one billion years old. But how did the first stars coalesce and ignite their nuclear fire?

Naoki Yoshida of Nagoya University in Japan and his colleagues used supercomputers to simulate the formation of the gravitational seeds for the first stars, beginning with the hot gas and cold dark matter right after the Big Bang and following their gravitational collapse. The models spanned 13 orders of magnitude, tracking the complicated motions of volumes of gas smaller than the Sun amid a primeval cosmic medium hundreds of thousands of light years across.

The resulting protostars eventually evolved into massive stars, a hundred times the mass of the Sun.