There’s a new contender for the universe’s earliest first-generation stars.
A bright clump seen about 450 million years after the Big Bang has the chemical hallmarks of first-generation stars — notably that it appears to have no elements heavier than helium. This identification, reported in a trio of papers submitted March 20 to arXiv.org, pushes evidence for these pristine stars much earlier than previous candidates.
First-generation stars, known as population III stars, probably would have been massive — up to 1,000 times the mass of the sun — and very bright. These stars were born with only the elements created in the Big Bang: hydrogen, helium and a tiny