A star carrying the remains of his older predecessors

Mohammad ALHADDAD

A newly discovered ancient star with a low standard amount of iron provides evidence of a class of older stars that scientists have long assumed to exist and then disappear.

In a study published July 17 in the Royal Astronomical Society, an international team of researchers at Australian, American and European universities confirmed the existence of a giant red star lacking minerals in the halo surrounding the Milky Way galaxy on the other side of the galaxy. 35,000 light-years from Earth.

The researchers identified the star's location using the National University of Australia's Sky Maper telescope.

Poverty in iron
The spectral analysis indicated that the star has an iron content of only one part per 50 billion parts of the star, which means that it is a "drop of water in an Olympic swimming pool," according to Dr. Nordlander of the National University of Australia and the lead researcher in the study, In the press release.

"This incredibly poor iron star, probably formed a few hundred million years after the Big Bang, has iron levels 1.5 million times lower than the estimated iron levels in the sun," Nordlander said.

The small percentage of iron concentration in the star has attracted the attention of astronomers. Scientists believe that the first stars in the universe consist only of hydrogen and helium, in addition to the effects of lithium.

These elements were formed in the immediate aftermath of the Big Bang, while all the heavier elements of supernova heat and pressure, the massive explosions of stars, appeared.

So stars like the sun rich in the heavy element contain materials from many generations of stars that exploded like supernovae.

Remnants of "Supernova"
Since none of the first stars have been found, their properties remain hypothetical and the subject of diligence from astronomers. These stars have long been expected to be incredibly massive, perhaps hundreds of times larger than the sun, and exploded in the active supernovae known as the Supernova.

Nordlander and colleagues note that the star they found was formed after one of the first stars exploded. It was found that this explosive star was ten times larger than the sun, and exploded only so poorly (by astronomical scales) that most of the heavy elements formed by the heat and pressure caused by the explosion of the supernova.

Among the quantities of iron produced by the massive supernova explosion, only a small amount of newly formed iron survived gravitational forces, and continued with much larger amounts of lighter elements in motion to form a new star, one of the first generation stars, the newly discovered star.