{"id":121313,"date":"2023-06-14T12:15:07","date_gmt":"2023-06-14T16:15:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/kendallharmon.net\/?p=121313"},"modified":"2023-06-14T17:57:13","modified_gmt":"2023-06-14T21:57:13","slug":"sa-at-last-astronomers-may-have-seen-the-universes-first-stars","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/kendallharmon.net\/?p=121313","title":{"rendered":"(SA) At Last, Astronomers May Have Seen the Universe\u2019s First Stars"},"content":{"rendered":"

The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) was built primarily to transform our understanding of the early universe. Less than a year after it was switched on, it is delivering, finding galaxies earlier in the universe\u00a0than any seen before<\/a>. Yet the telescope has another, less publicized goal in probing those earliest moments after the big bang 13.8 billion years ago. It is hunting for signs of\u00a0the first stars to switch on in the universe<\/a>, so-called Population III stars, gigantic balls purely made of hydrogen and helium that shined brilliant and brightly to first bring light to the cosmos. \u201cThey\u2019ve been sort of in the background,\u201d says Garth Illingworth of the University of California, Santa Cruz, largely because finding them is so difficult. No definitive detection of such stars has ever been made, but we know they must exist. Now two new results are bringing us closer than ever before to their discovery.<\/p>\n

In a pair of papers posted on the preprint server arXiv.org, two teams of astronomers report promising signs of Population III stars. In the first study, led by Roberto Maiolino of the University of Cambridge, researchers think they\u00a0may have found a pocket of Population III stars<\/a>\u00a0nestling in the outskirts of a remote galaxy. The second study, led by Eros Vanzella of the National Institute for Astrophysics in Italy,\u00a0hints at a tiny galaxy<\/a>\u00a0that may be composed of, if not Population III stars per se, extremely primordial stars born early in the cosmos. \u201cThese papers quite nicely highlight the different aspects of the search,\u201d says Jorryt Matthee of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, who was not involved with either paper. \u201cWe\u2019re almost there.\u201d<\/p>\n

Read it all<\/a>.<\/p>\n

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Telltale evidence gathered by the James Webb Space Telescope suggests we're closer than ever before to finding elusive Population III stars https:\/\/t.co\/zQHn9sJ3GZ<\/a><\/p>\n

— Scientific American (@sciam) June 13, 2023<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n