Live Fast, Die Young: The first stars and their lasting impact on our Universe

Talk Abstract

Today, our universe consists of trillions of galaxies, each of which contains billions of stars and planets just like our own Solar System. But how did it come to be this way? In this talk, we will travel 13.7 billion years into the past, when the universe was just a dense soup of particles. As it began to expand and cool, something incredible happened: clumps of gas collapsed into the first stars, which lit up the universe. These first stars were far bigger and hotter than our Sun. They burned through their fuel thousands of times faster, and ended their lives in some of the biggest explosions in the history of the universe. I will dive into our theories on this first population of stars, including how their deaths left remnants that became the material for the objects that now populate our universe. Finally, I will show how we may soon be able to observe these stars for the first time with the James Webb Space Telescope.