NEW YORK: Astronomers think that for the first time, they may have glimpsed some of the first stars that formed after the Big Bang.
Evidence of such “first-generation” stars was spotted in the brightest galaxy ever found in the early universe, a galaxy named CR7 (after Portuguese soccer star Cristiano Ronaldo), using the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope, scientists report in a paper that has been accepted for publication in the Astrophysical Journal.
“It really doesn’t get more exciting than this,” said David Sobral, the astronomer who led the research, in a statement. Sobral is with the Institute of Astrophysics and Space Sciences at the University of Lisbon in Portugal and the Leiden Observatory in the Netherlands.
Scientists have been searching for such first generation or “Population III” stars for a long time. Such stars were thought to be up to a thousand times more massive than the sun and very short-lived, exploding as supernovas after just a couple of million years.
Those first-generation stars were thought to hide in only the earliest, smallest, dimmest galaxies, making them very difficult to find.
But if they were found, the could be easily identified because they would have formed from the only elements that existed in the universe at the time — hydrogen, helium and traces of lithium, the three lightest elements that exist on the periodic table.
That’s exactly what CR7 looked like — when Sobral and his team carefully scanned a bright pocket in one part of the galaxy, they found no sign of any heavier elements. Such elements, including carbon, oxygen, iron and calcium formed later in the history of the universe, and have become an important part of our bodies and our world.
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