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The newly identified star located in the yellow box of this image is half of a binary.
Credit: ESO / BELETSKY / DSS1 + DSS2 + 2MASS
Astronomers believe they have identified an aged star about 13.5 billion years ago, which would place it right after the Big Bang – and it is surprisingly close to us.
The new discovery suggests that our own corner of the galaxy is perhaps older than previously calculated, and scientists hope that the study of the star, called 2MASS J18082002-5104378 B, tells us more about the beginnings of the universe.
"This star is perhaps one in 10 million," said in a statement the main author, Kevin Schlaufman, astronomer at Johns Hopkins University. "It tells us something very important about the first generations of stars."
It is also an unusual star from the point of view of its orbit: it is nestled in the thin disk of the Milky Way and remains in the galactic plane, as our sun does, rather than moving away from this one, like most stars run out of metals.
Astronomers are looking for these metal-poor stars, as they formed shortly after the Big Bang, before many stars could explode in supernovae and disperse heavier elements into the universe. Scientists have identified a few handfuls of these incredibly old stars, but the identified news is much smaller, with only 14% of our sun's mass. They hope that this new discovery will be the first of a long series of incredible star observations.
"If our inference is correct, then the low-mass stars that have a composition exclusively from the Big Bang may exist," Schlaufman said in his statement. "Even though we have not yet found an object of this type in our galaxy, it may exist."
The new research is described in an article published November 5 in The Astrophysical Journal.
Email Meghan Bartels at [email protected] or follow her. @meghanbartels. follow us @Spacedotcom and Facebook. Original article on Space.com.
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