Everything indicates that astronomers have discovered in the distant cosmos chemical traces of some of the first stars that formed in the universe.
The first stars probably formed when the universe was only 100 million years old, less than one percent of its current age. Unlike the later stars, which formed, form and will form from raw material that comes in part from material generated by other stars, the first stars were created exclusively from material generated by the Big Bang, the colossal “explosion” with which the universe was born.
Many of those early stars (known as Population III) were so titanic massive that when they ended their lives as supernovae they were completely destroyed, leaving neither a neutron star nor a black hole behind as corpses. Its matter spread out into interstellar space, seeding it with a distinctive mix of heavy chemical elements. However, despite decades of diligent searching by astronomers, there has been no direct evidence for this class of primordial stars, until now.
Using the Gemini North Telescope, one of two identical telescopes that make up the Gemini International Observatory, run by the US National Science Foundation’s (NSF) NOIRLab, astronomers believe they have identified material left over from the explosion of a prime generation.
The identification has been made by analyzing one of the most distant known quasars. The light from this quasar has taken 13.1 billion years to reach Earth, meaning it was emitted when the universe was only about 700 million years old.
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Source: NCYT