Stars made from only primordial gas finally spotted, astronomers claim
By Daniel Clery, Science.
Excerpt: Staring deep into space and far back in time, a team of astronomers may have spotted a galaxy full of stars made from only the primordial gas created in the Big Bang. Such “population III stars” would have formed from hydrogen and helium and nothing else, and researchers have been searching for them for decades.... If confirmed, the discovery, made with NASA’s JWST space observatory, opens a window on the starting point of the chemical enrichment of the universe, in which the heavier elements needed to make planets and life began to be forged in stellar explosions. ...The nature of population III stars remains uncertain. Most theorists think they were huge, with masses up to 1000 times that of the Sun, 10 times larger than any star around today. ...The gigantic stars that resulted would also burn hot and fast, ending in a supernova explosion after just a few million years. That brief first flash of population III stars is hard for astronomers to spot in galaxies that went on to shine steadily for billions of years with smaller, longer lived stars. But the spectrum of the light from the giant stars might give them away. Different elements absorb and emit characteristic wavelengths of light. Population III stars would produce very strong emission lines for hydrogen and helium and would lack completely spectral lines produced by heavier elements. ...Rohan Naidu, an astronomer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and his colleagues found a way to speed up the search, as they described in a preprint posted to the arXiv server last month....