A team of astronomers identified the oldest stars in the Milky Way Galaxy, which will also give them insight to hypernovas that lit up the galaxy once upon a time.
"These pristine stars are among the oldest surviving stars in the Universe, and certainly the oldest stars we have ever seen," study lead author Louise Howes, from The Australian National University (ANU), said in a press release. "These stars formed before the Milky Way, and the galaxy formed around them.
"The stars have surprisingly low levels of carbon, iron and other heavy elements, which suggests the first stars might not have exploded as normal supernovae."
Published in the journal Nature, the new study details how the ancient stars were metal-poor, but exploded into supernovas that bred metal-rich stars. The ancient stars likely came shortly after the Milky Way's first stars exploded in the particularly powerful hypernovas, Space.com reported.
"Perhaps they ended their lives as hypernovae - poorly understood explosions of probably rapidly rotating stars producing 10 times as much energy as normal supernovae," Howes said in the release.
For their study, the astronomers examined 23 metal-poor stars in the Milky Way's outer rim, also known as the "halo," using the Magellan Clay telescope array in Chile.
"This work really changes our ideas of what the first stars would have looked like, and how they would have developed and died, and how the galaxy would have evolved," Howes told Space.com, "and also sheds light on the formation of all the elements in the universe."
