So -- I've been reading a little about the sun and its composition. And the idea by (some, i guess) scientists is that the sun and stars came from a Big Bang. So the question is: how big was the material in the clump? that initiated the "Big Bang"? A secondary question is: did that clump have anything outside of that clump? There are more questions but maybe we can talk about it a little.
(Not that anyone knows...but we can try to see maybe what scientists are saying...well, some of them anyway.)
Like
@exchemist said, you need to read up, do little research, and understand the sources you are reading from, and even then it doesn’t make you expert, so I would suggest in getting help by asking questions.
From what I understand on the subject. At the start of the Big Bang, the universe was just extremely hot and dense, and in plasma state, where matters (eg molecules, atoms, protons, neutrons, electrons, etc) as we know it, don’t exist yet, because it is too hot and dense.
As temperatures drop, the Universe becomes cool enough for elementary particles to form, eg quarks, gluons, electrons, photons, neutrinos, W bosons, Z bosons, Higgs boson, etc. These particles didn’t form at the same time, so you need to read up on the Big Bang timeline to understand when each particles form, eg Quark Epoch, Lepton Epoch, Hadron Epoch, etc.
For examples, quarks were formed during the Quark Epoch, and formed from the quark-gluon plasma. And if you know anything about atoms and particle physics, you would know that 3 quarks would make composite particles of either protons, or neutrons, and that didn’t occur until the Hadron Epoch.
Atoms didn’t form until the period of the Big Bang Nucleosynthesis (BBN), when nuclei formed without electrons, so there were elements of hydrogen, deuterium (a hydrogen atom with isotope of one neutron), helium and lithium formed their nuclei, but the universe was still hot and dense plasma, so these atoms formed without electrons.
It wasn’t until 378,000 years after the Big Bang, that the universe was cool enough for the electrons to bond with these earliest atoms (hydrogen, helium and lithium atoms) in a period known as Recombination Epoch.
This bonding between atom nucleus and electron, cause a number things to happen:
- Atoms became electrically neutral and stable.
- Photon particles would decouple from neutral atoms, leaving heat signatures as Cosmic Background Radiation (CBR).
- Universe don’t exist completely in plasma state, so the universe that was opaque BEFORE the Recombination Epoch, became transparent DURING the Recombination Epoch.
- And as transparent Universe, photons can travel freely, and not be scattered and reabsorbed by hot plasma.
- These photons are the oldest light detected in the still young universe (378,000 years after the BB). These photons and heat signature it left behind, are known as the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation (CMBR).
All these events in the Big Bang timeline (including the Recombination Epoch), occurred before the stars and galaxies formed.
After the Recombination Epoch, the next phase was the Dark Age, because once all the atoms became neutral, photons stopped decoupling, and for unknown number of tens of million years there was no light in the cool universe.
Then the Big Bang explains another epoch known as Reionization or the Cosmic Reionization, where plasma formed again, reheating the Universe, these plasma formed in the clouds of molecular hydrogen.
When one of these clouds of molecule hydrogen reach critical mass and critical density, the cloud would reach point of gravitational collapse, igniting thermonuclear fusions (fusion better known as Stellar Nucleosynthesis), hence the formation of the earliest star.
The earliest generation of stars didn’t form like
@Polymath257 said, millions of years after the Big Bang, but more like AFTER the 300-million-year after the Big Bang.
In 2016, the most oldest and most distant galaxy detected in the Observable Universe was GN-z11, with redshift (z) of 11.09, so about 13.4 billion light years away. So GN-z11 formed about 400 million years after the Big Bang.
In 2022, another more distant galaxy was discovered, called HD1, z (redshift) of 13.27, so about 324 million years after the Big Bang.
By finding the most distant galaxies in the Observable Universe, astrophysicists can pinpoint when the star’s first formed. At the moment, HD1 and GN-z11 have provided our best clues, yet.
And this where the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) come in, with it near-infrared instrument and much higher resolution than the aging Hubble Space Telescope (HST).
And as Polymath257 said, our Solar System didn’t form with the Big Bang’s earliest generation of stars, our Sun formed over 9 billion years after the Big Bang.
Our sun, is at least, a 3rd generation star.
At this time, we have no technology and no telescopes capable of detecting first generation of stars, so the best we can do, is finding distant galaxies to determine when first stars possibly formed.