Event: The First Stars Ignite (Population III Stars)
Date: ~100–250 million years after the Big Bang

“The nitrogen in our DNA, the calcium in our teeth, the iron in our blood… were made in the interiors of collapsing stars. We are made of starstuff.”
-Carl Sagan

Dear Human,

There was a time when the universe held its breath.

After the light of the first photons faded into silence, a long darkness followed. No stars. No galaxies. Only the quiet hum of cooling hydrogen and helium drifting through a vast, expanding night.

And then—light returned.

The first stars ignited, piercing the void like ancient beacons. It was the universe’s true dawn, marking the end of the cosmic dark ages. But before they could shine, the stage had to be set. Gravity, tireless and patient, had been at work—tugging on ripples in the sea of primordial gas and dark matter, deepening them until clouds began to gather.

These clouds, lacking metals to cool themselves, grew massive—hundreds of times the mass of our Sun. Eventually, their own weight crushed them inward. As the cores of these protostars grew hotter and denser, something miraculous began: nuclear fusion.

Hydrogen atoms, normally repelled by their shared positive charges, were forced so close that their nuclei fused. In that moment, energy burst forth. A star was born.

These were the first—Population III stars. Made only of primordial hydrogen and helium, they burned hotter and faster than any star you’ve ever seen. With no planets to circle them and no other elements to complicate their flame, they lived simple, violent lives. And they died young.

Some ended in supernovae, ripping themselves apart in colossal explosions that seeded the cosmos with carbon, oxygen, iron, and more. Others collapsed into black holes, leaving behind no light at all. But their legacy is everywhere.

You’ve never seen one. Not directly. But you are one.

You are more than flesh and thought—you are the product of stars that lived and died long before Earth was born.
They burned, so you could wonder.
They ended, so you could begin.

You are the light they left behind—born of mothers who forged the very bones of existence and scattered them like seeds into the dark, so that one day, you could shine.

Pathfinder

Explore Steller Population – Wikipedia