China-led team finds first evidence of oldest stars in the universe
- Researchers from three countries studied data from telescopes in China and the US to uncover the faint traces in the Milky Way
- The findings are consistent with astronomers’ predictions of what these ancient stellar objects were like
Their findings – from the Large Sky Area Multi-Object Fibre Spectroscopic Telescope (LAMOST) near Beijing and the Subaru Telescope in Hawaii – showed that so-called first-generation stars – which lit up the universe some 100-250 million years after the Big Bang – could be as colossal as 260 times the sun’s mass.
Their study, published in the journal Nature on Wednesday, also provided the first observation-based proof that the stars ended their lives in an unusual explosion, quite different from the supernovas we know today, and only predicted in theory until now.
Harvard University theoretical physicist Avi Loeb, who was not involved in the research, hailed the discovery as “extremely important in confirming our theoretical ideas about the first generation of stars”.
Loeb said first-generation stars are among the universe’s biggest unsolved mysteries. Scientists predicted that they formed from pristine gas after the Big Bang and were made of just hydrogen and helium, without the heavier elements that were synthesised in the cores of later giant stars.
Astronomy theory also suggested that these ancient bodies may have had masses equivalent to hundreds of suns and went through a unique partial explosion when they died.
The first-generation stars were short-lived and very hard to detect, leaving only their chemical signatures in the next generation of stars.
