Finding these rare stars is really like looking for a needle in a haystack. But if we select these stars in the right way, it’s like burning down the farm and sweeping up the needles with a magnet.
- Andrew Casey
An international team of astronomers, led by researchers from the University of Cambridge and the Australian National University, have identified some of the oldest stars in our galaxy, which could contain vital clues about the early Universe, including an indication of how the first stars died.
These stars, which have been at the very centre of the Milky Way for billions of years, contain extremely low amounts of metal: one of the stars is the most metal-poor star yet discovered in the centre of our galaxy. These stars also contain chemical fingerprints which indicate that the very first stars may have died in spectacular deaths known as hypernovae, which were ten times more energetic than a regular supernova. The findings, reported in the journal Nature, could aid in understanding just how much the Universe has changed over the past 13.7 billion years.
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Image: An artist's impression of a hypernova, an explosive death of a star roughly ten times more energetic than a normal supernova.
Credit: ESO
Reproduced courtesy of the University of Cambridge
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