Researchers may have found the remains of one of the universe's earliest stars, created right after the big bang.
Scientific models have predicted many of these early stars were hundreds of times larger than the Sun, but this is the first time researchers have found direct evidence, the BBC reported.
"This is quite a unique star, with a very peculiar chemical pattern that has never been found previously," lead author Dr Wako Aoki, from the National Observatory of Japan, told the BBC.
The first stars in the universe, known as Population III stars, were formed from the hydrogen and helium present in the early universe, Discovery News reported. Through nuclear fusion other elements were incorporated into the stars such as magnesium, iron carbon and oxygen. When these stars died in supernova explosions the elements were scattered throughout the universe, and became the seeds of the next generation of stars.
"It was a very featureless, boring Universe. Then the first stars formed and fundamentally transformed it," Volker Bromm from the University of Texas, Austin told the BBC.
The newly-discovered early star, dubbed SDSS J0018-0939, had less iron than our own Sun ( a low-metallicity star).
To make their findings the Japanese research team produced high-resolution "spectra" of 150 stars by breaking them down into different wavelengths; they noticed one of these stars had a very strange chemical composition. When the team broke down the light some of the colors were missing that are usually present, each color can only be absorbed by a certain element.
"The low abundance of heavy elements suggests that this star is quite old - as old as 13 billion years," Aoki told Discovery News. Researchers believe the Bog Bang occurred 13.8 million years ago.
The findings were published in a recent edition of the journal Science.
