Astronomy: Traces of the first stars may have been found in the universe

A research team from the United States and Japan may have found the remains of a star from the first post-Big Bang population. This is explained by the American research center NOIRLab, whose tools were used for this. They discovered it in one of the most active galactic cores and determined that the cloud around the supermassive black hole had a “very unusual composition”. Compared to the amount of iron and magnesium in our sun, iron is ten times more abundant there. The most likely explanation for this is that the material was left over when the so-called Population III star exploded.

The first generation of stars

Already 100 million years after the Big Bang the first stars in the universe were formed, Summarizes the National Research Laboratory of Optical and Infrared Astronomy (NOIRLab) summarizes the relevant state of cosmology. So these were extremely massive stars that exploded relatively quickly in what are called pairwise unstable supernovae and were completely destroyed. To date, such an explosion has been observed at most once. Otherwise, you can only look for the characteristic chemical signatures of matter being thrown into space. That’s exactly what the team led by Yozuru Yoshi of the University of Tokyo has now done using the Gemini North Telescope on the Hawaiian Maunakia volcano.

The team says that the unusual composition of matter around the distant black hole can only be attributed to the explosion of a star about 300 times the mass of our sun, which was completely destroyed. After that, the material will be thrown into space in the explosion and will reach the active black hole. Such a quasar shines very brightly because the material that falls into it rapidly accelerates and heats up on the way. After 13.1 billion years of traveling toward us, this light has now discovered an extraordinary ratio of iron to magnesium.

If this assumption is confirmed, the discovery could help complete our picture of how matter in our universe evolved and spread. However, more observations are needed for this. The research team believes that the chemical signature of these starbursts can now be found more closely: “We now know what to look for,” says Timothy Beers of the University of Notre Dame. research work Featured in The Astrophysical Journal.

(mo)