July 9, 2009--Two hot knots of gas collapse to become the cores of stars, each five times as massive as our sun, in a computer simulation of a star-forming region that existed 200 million years after the big bang.

Some of the universe's first stars might have been born as twins, according to a new study appearing in the journal Science, which shows how primordial clouds of gas could split into two dense stellar cores, like the ones seen above, and eventually form binary star systems.