The Basic Building Blocks of Galaxies

Abstract

Current cold dark matter models of structure formation make a clear prediction for cosmic structures in the Dark Ages. We discuss the formation and nature of the first collapsed and first luminous objects in the universe arising in these theories. The first virialized objects are dark matter halos at the free streaming length which depends on the mass and nature of the assumed weakly interacting massive particle. The first objects that also contain significant fractions of gas have masses of the cosmological Jeans scale ∼ 10^4M _⊙ at the redshifts of interest (z ∼ 30). The first pre-galactic objects that host stars have masses of 10⁶ M _⊙. This mass scale is given by the requirement of a sufficiently high virial temperature to enable the chemical reactions necessary to form molecular hydrogen which subsequently allows the gas to dissipate its gravitational energy and to collapse to form a star. An individual massive star is formed per such object and explodes in a supernova within a few Myrs. All these stages of the formation of the first objects are illustrated by fully resolved three dimensional cosmological hydrodynamic simulations.