"Stability of a Primordial Gas Cloud"

© Hartwig et al. 2015

The first stars in the Universe formed out of primordial gas, which only consists of hydrogen and helium. We use hydrodynamical simulations to follow the collapse and fragmentation of these gas clouds in order to better understand the formation of the first stars and to estimate their stellar masses.

Here, we see the Toomre stability parameter in a region 100 bigger than our solar system. This parameter quantifies the stability of a gaseous disk and it indicates that most of the primordial gas is susceptible to fragmentation.

These results are based on the publication by Hartwig et al. 2015: arxiv.org/abs/1407.2102