Imprint of primordial monster star found

[Judi Lynn]

Imprint of primordial monster star found

Chemical signature in relic star brings long-awaited evidence for massive stellar ancestors.
Elizabeth Gibney

21 August 2014

The very first stars in the Universe might have been hundreds of times more massive than the Sun.[/font]

Astronomers have found evidence for the existence of the monster stars long thought to have populated the early Universe. Weighing in at hundreds of times the mass of the Sun, such stars would have been the first to fuse primordial hydrogen and helium into heavier elements, leaving behind a chemical signature that the researchers have now found in an ancient, second-generation star.

Little is known about the Universe’s first stars, which would have formed out of clouds of hydrogen, helium and a tiny amount of lithium in the first few hundred million years after the Big Bang.

Simulations have long predicted that some of this first batch of stars were enormous1, 2. With masses of more than 100 times that of the Sun, they would have lived and died in the cosmic blink of an eye, a few million years. As they exploded in supernovae, they created the first heavy elements from which later galaxies and stars evolved. But no traces of their existence have previously been found.

Now, using a technique called stellar archaeology, Wako Aoki at the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan in Tokyo and his colleagues have found the first hint of such a star, preserved in the chemical make-up of its ancient daughter. The chemistry of this relic — a star called SDSS J0018-0939 — suggests that it may have formed from a cloud of gas seeded with material created in the explosion of a single, very massive star. The results were published in Science on 21 August3.

More:
http://www.nature.com/news/imprint-of-primordial-monster-star-found-1.15751

[Enthusiast]

1. Kicked and recommended!

Thank you for sharing this, Judi Lynn.