Astronomers may have discovered the signature of one of the Universe's earliest stars. Theoretical models predict that some of the very first stars were hundreds of times larger than the Sun. But no clear evidence of this had been found so far. Scientists writing in the journal Science have discovered the traces of an early massive stellar object in the exceptional chemical composition of a star in our galaxy. Read more
A Chemical Signature of First-Generation Very-Massive Stars
A team of astronomers from the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan (NAOJ), the Konan University and the University of Hyogo in Japan, the University of Notre Dame, and New Mexico State University (Note 1) has used the 8.2 m Subaru Telescope's High Dispersion Spectrograph (HDS) to discover a low-mass star, SDSS J0018-0939, that exhibits the peculiar chemical abundance ratios associated with the process of creating new atomic nuclei (nucleosynthesis) in a first-generation very-massive star. Until now, no observational evidence has supported numerical simulations of the existence of very-massive stars among the first generation of stars formed after the Big Bang. Read more