Scientists find one of the oldest stars in the universe in a galaxy right next to ours
- by Live Science
- Apr 25, 2024
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Related: Astronomers find remnants of the oldest stars in the universe
A James Webb Space Telescope image of the 30 Doradus nebula, a turbulent star-forming region in the Large Magellanic Cloud.
(Image credit: NASA, ESA, Elena Sabbi (ESA, STScI))
By measuring the amounts of these elements in a star, astronomers can estimate its age. The less "ash" that has accumulated, the older the star must be, while younger stars have built up a lot of elements from many earlier generations.
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None of the first-generation stars has ever been observed, but astronomers have spotted some ancient stars of the second generation in our galaxy. These fossils are very rare. Fewer than 1 in 100,000 stars in our galaxy is from that second generation. "You really are fishing needles out of haystacks," Chiti said in a statement.
From these relics, astronomers have learned a lot about the early conditions in our galaxy. Now, they want to understand if the Milky Way is typical or if those conditions were different in other galaxies.
To answer this question, the study authors turned their sights to one of our nearest galactic neighbors, the LMC. Visible to the naked eye from the Southern Hemisphere, the LMC is smaller than the Milky Way and destined to merge with it in about 2.4 billion years.
"The LMC is notable because it is nearly a major galaxy in its own right" and was only recently caught in the pull of the Milky Way, Chiti said.
The team searched for old stars in the LMC in data gathered by the European Space Agency's Gaia space telescope. They followed up using the 6.5-meter Magellan telescope in Chile and identified 10 stars with about 100 times less iron than other LMC stars contain, meaning they were very ancient.
An illustration of the Gaia spacecraft as it makes its observations.
(Image credit: ESA)
One stood out. Known as LMC-119, it had less of this cosmic pollution than any known star outside our galaxy. This suggested it formed from gas enriched by just one supernova and was a sure sign that LMC-119 is a second-generation star and very ancient.
"I'd say LMC-119 is very likely at least about 13 billion years old," Chiti told Live Science. (For comparison, the universe itself is estimated to be 13.8 billion years old.)
Today, the LMC is about 160,000 light-years away, but the authors estimated that it was about 6 million light-years distant when its earliest stars formed. "This isolates the early LMC from ejecta from the first stars that formed in the early Milky Way," they said in the paper. This means that the LMC's ancient stars can tell astronomers about infant conditions in another galaxy.
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