Population III Protostar Ignition

You drift within the outer envelope of a collapsing primordial halo, suspended perhaps two or three light-years from the only fusion fire that has ever burned in this universe — a hypermassive Population III protostellar core, blazing blue-white at tens of thousands of Kelvin, its hard ultraviolet radiation the first coherent photon flood in a cosmos that has known only darkness and the cooling whisper of expansion. Around it, a Strömgren sphere expands with crystalline precision: a sharp ionization front rendered in electric cyan and translucent violet, the boundary between a newborn HII region swept nearly transparent inside and the surrounding primordial cloud — dense, amber-brown, folded in slow convective curtains of pure hydrogen and helium — that remains utterly unchanged beyond. There is no dust to scatter the light, no carbon, no silicon, no oxygen anywhere in this scene; the photons travel perfectly clean through ionized space, giving the bubble an impossibly hard-edged clarity that no later nebula will ever possess, because every nebula that follows will be built from the ash this star is about to forge. At the very edge of perception, the CMB sky at roughly 54 Kelvin suffuses the outermost gas sheets with a barely-there crimson warmth — not light from any source, but the thermal memory of the universe itself, reluctantly yielding its monopoly on energy to the singular, savage eye now opening at the center of everything.