A hierarchical explosion scheme for the origin of cosmological structure

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Abstract
The explosions of pregalactic stars in the period 10 < z < 103, when Compton cooling dominates, could initiate a bootstrap process in which ever-larger shells of swept-up gas successively fragment into more exploding stars. We derive a simple relationship between the amplifications occurring at each stage and infer that the shell mass, in the absence of shell mergers, would tend to a characteristic value which depends only on the redshift and explosive efficiency. When radiative-cooling begins to dominate at z ≈ 10, the shells should fragment into galactic-size objects rather than stars but by then the shells could already be large enough to serve as the ‘seeds’ required in the Ostriker–Cowie–Ikeuchi picture. They might even be large enough to generate the filamentary structure and giant voids indicated by recent observational results, providing the shells eventually overlap. Thus the formation of a few pregalactic stars could naturally lead to the present cosmological structure.

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