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A team of astronomers has discovered what could be one of the oldest stars in the universe, almost entirely made of materials formed by the Big Bang.
Residing in the same part of the Milky Way galaxy as our own solar system, the star would be 13.5 billion years old, as evidenced by its extremely low metal content, or metallicity, has reported the Xinhua news agency.
According to co-author Andrew Casey, it was previously thought that the first stars that would have formed in the universe could probably no longer exist today.
"The results are significant because for the first time we were able to demonstrate directly that very old, low-mass stars already existed and could survive to the present day without destroying themselves," Casey said. .
The metallicity of stars increases as they are born and die, in a cycle that results in the creation of more and more heavy metals, the Earth's sun being around 100,000 generations and holding a metal content approximately equal to 14 Jupiters.
The stars created at the beginning of the universe would however have been entirely composed of elements such as hydrogen, helium and small amounts of lithium, which means the very low metallicity of the universe. Newly discovered star, about the same as that of the planet Mercury.
This suggests that it could be as little as a generation removed from the beginning of the universe, the researchers noted.
Until around 1990, scientists thought that only massive stars could be formed in the early stages of the universe and could never be observed because they burn their fuel so quickly and die.
However, the new study has shown that it is possible for low-mass stars to last as long as 13 billion years since the Big Bang – red dwarf stars, for example, which have a fraction of the mass of the sun, live for billions of years.
–IANS
rt / ksk / sed
(This story has not been changed by Business Standard staff and is generated automatically from a syndicated feed.)
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