Remnants of the universe’s first stars may have been found

Astronomers may have discovered the remnants of some of the first stars in the universe. These stars must have been very different from those that formed recently, and studying their ashes could help us understand the early universe.

Stefania Salvadori and her colleagues at the University of Florence in Italy discovered these traces using the Chilean Very Large Telescope. Although they did not observe them directly, they used light from quasars to infer the existence of these protostars.

As light from a quasar propagates through space, it passes through gas clouds that absorb certain wavelengths depending on the elements involved. Researchers used this absorption to identify her three distant gas clouds, nearly 25 billion light-years away, exhibiting strange chemical signatures. Because light takes time to travel through space, researchers observed these clouds when they appeared more than 11 billion years before him.

Gas clouds like these are often left behind after a star explodes in a supernova and blows out its contents. However, astronomers expect that some of the first stars did not explode completely, leaving their cores and the heavier elements within intact. In contrast, it left clouds rich in carbon, oxygen, and magnesium, but containing little or no iron.

That’s exactly what the researchers found. “Our findings open a new avenue for indirectly studying the properties of the first stars and perfectly complement the study of stars in our galaxy,” Salvadori said in a statement. Some of the oldest stars in our galaxy seem to have formed from gas clouds like this containing the ashes of even older stars.

Now that we know these clouds are there, we can point other telescopes at them to get a better picture of their properties. said like this. This could help explain how the early universe transitioned from frigid darkness to light, the researchers said in a statement.