The building blocks of rocky planets may have formed just 100 million years after the Big Bang. New computer simulations push planet formation far earlier than anyone expected.

The research was led by Daniel Whalen of the University of Portsmouth. His PhD student Chris Jessop ran the first stage of the simulation chain. The findings were published in the Astrophysical Letters Journal.

Astronomers had long assumed that planet formation began several billion years into cosmic history. Carbon, oxygen and iron did not exist at the start. They had to be forged inside stars first.

The new work shows the first massive stars, known as Pop III stars, supplied those ingredients fast. A pair-instability supernova can blast out more than 100 times the Sun’s mass in heavy elements in a single explosion.

The simulations found one disk of enriched material around a young star about 70 percent as massive as the Sun. Inside it, enough solid material collected to build several Earth-masses of planetary building blocks. The disk also contained significant water.

One hundred million years is less than one percent of the Universe’s 13.8-billion-year age. The result raises the possibility that habitable worlds could have existed far earlier than thought.