An American observatory stated that the first stars in the universe were significantly different from the Sun and similar stars, because they did not contain metals.
The press service of the American observatory, Noir Lab, said in a statement carried by Sputnik yesterday that minerals were formed only in the course of thermonuclear fusion, and following the explosions of the first stars, they became part of future generations.
Stars without heavy elements can be of any size, so the oldest luminous stars can be hundreds of times heavier than the Sun.
However, these stars did not live long, and ended their existence as the most powerful unstable binary supernova.
Yozuru Yoshi of the University of Tokyo’s Astronomical Institute and his colleagues discovered traces of a supernova explosion located in the quasar J1342 + 0928, which is 13 billion light-years away from Earth.
The researchers were also interested in whether iron, magnesium, and some other atoms were present during the explosion.
Scientists concluded that it was practically absent in the early universe, as it appeared largely only in the stars of the third group (the first generation following the Big Bang).
