{"id":207101,"date":"2025-10-07T16:24:08","date_gmt":"2025-10-07T16:24:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/207101\/"},"modified":"2025-10-07T16:24:08","modified_gmt":"2025-10-07T16:24:08","slug":"primeval-star-may-be-the-most-pristine-object-ever-discovered-in-the-universe","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/207101\/","title":{"rendered":"Primeval Star May Be the Most ‘Pristine’ Object Ever Discovered in the Universe"},"content":{"rendered":"

Stars are the original nuclear fusion reactors. As it evolves, a star continuously fuses hydrogen, helium, and\u2014if it becomes big enough\u2014heavier elements, releasing the energy created into space as light and heat. The earliest stars, however, were a little different. Astronomers believed that the universe\u2019s first stars<\/a> were more \u201cpristine<\/a>,\u201d meaning that they consisted of only the lightest of elements.<\/p>\n

For years, scientists thought it unlikely that such primordial stars still existed\u2014until now. A team of astronomers led by Alexander Ji at the University of Chicago recently revealed that they had spotted a star, SDSS J0715-7334, that appears to have an unprecedentedly low concentration of metals (astronomy shorthand for elements other than hydrogen and helium). The star seems to be sitting in the halo of the Large Magellanic Cloud, a dwarf galaxy about 163,000 light-years from the Milky Way. The astronomers detailed the discovery in a paper uploaded to arXiv<\/a>, which has yet to be peer-reviewed.<\/p>\n

Tracing stellar \u2018genetics\u2019 <\/p>\n

Carl Sagan is famous for saying that we are made of \u201cstar stuff,<\/a>\u201d and at a glance, our evolution and that of stars\u2019 appears surprisingly similar. Just like us, stars, too, belong to distinct \u201cgenerations\u201d that have slightly different elemental compositions. Scientific consensus has long held that the earliest stars, mainly composed of hydrogen and helium, eventually exploded into supernovae. These cataclysms essentially seeded our universe with element-rich gases that helped to birth the next generation of stars.<\/p>\n

Yet astronomers believed we could still get a peek at the direct descendants of the very first stars\u2014a group referred to as Population III<\/a>\u2014by searching for low-mass stars with low metallicity.<\/p>\n

\u2018Pristine\u2019 outlier <\/p>\n

The team first detected SDSS J0715-7334 using data from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey<\/a>, and then used the Magellan telescope in Chile to further observe the star. To be clear, this isn\u2019t the first \u201cpristine\u201d star astronomers have found\u2014the James Webb Space Telescope has proven particularly adept at picking out candidates for early-generation stars\u2014but SDSS J0715-7334 sets itself apart from the rest, the researchers noted.<\/p>\n

It is \u201cover ten times more metal-poor\u201d than previous Webb discoveries, \u201csome of which have been claimed to be potentially metal-free,\u201d the astronomers wrote. Not only that, but the star has extremely low levels of carbon, which may be a first for similar discoveries. Together, these features make it \u201cthe most pristine composition of any object known in the universe,\u201d the researchers argued.<\/p>\n

The low carbon levels are particularly interesting, as previously discovered \u201cpristine\u201d or metal-poor stars generally displayed high carbon levels. Astronomers believed<\/a> that relatively heavier elements like carbon allow these stars to cool down and not explode.<\/p>\n

The lack of carbon on SDSS J0715-7334 suggests that \u201cdifferent environments in different places in the universe cool their gas differently at early times,\u201d Anna Frebel, an astronomer at MIT who was not involved in the new paper, told New Scientist<\/a>. \u201cWe can ask the question, why do they cool it differently, but I don\u2019t think we have a good answer to that,\u201d she added.<\/p>\n

To find out, the search for these kinds of primordial stars must continue, the researchers said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Stars are the original nuclear fusion reactors. As it evolves, a star continuously fuses hydrogen, helium, and\u2014if it…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":207102,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[8149,79,23957],"class_list":["post-207101","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-science","tag-astrophysics","tag-science","tag-stellar-evolution"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/207101","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=207101"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/207101\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/207102"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=207101"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=207101"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=207101"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}