Clouds of gas drifting through the early Universe have given astronomers a glimpse at what remains of the very first stars ever born.
, ending in supernova explosions that spewed their contents out into space, to be taken up in the next generation of star formation.
But the nuclear factories in their cores fused the atoms of these elements to create heavier ones, like carbon, oxygen, and magnesium; these elements then spread into space when the star exploded. "Primordial stars can be studied indirectly by detecting the chemical elements they dispersed in their environment after their death,"To look for the guts of primordial stars, Saccardi and his colleagues used the X-shooter instrument on the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope to analyze the light of very bright, distant galaxies known as quasars.
Scientists can carefully study these signatures in a spectrum and link them to specific elements. The researchers collected observations of 54 such clouds of material and looked for traces of the elements likely to be strewn through space by Population III stars, in combination with a low level of heavier elements such as iron.
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