Astronomers believe that the Universe needed about 100 million years to be illuminated by its first stars. That means that the observable Universe was a very dark place for 100 million years, without taking into account the huge light emitted by the Big Bang roughly 13.7 billion years ago.
Therefore, you might find it absurd for the Universe to need so much time to create its first stars. You are clearly not the only one, but nature works in mysterious ways.
Eyes set on Population III stars
Population III stars represent exactly the oldest stars in the Universe that we were talking about above. Their chemical traces were potentially discovered by scientists for the first time, according to Space.com. Those ancient stars exploded in a so-called ‘super-supernova.’
It’s generally accepted in the scientific community that some of the heaviest chemical elements known, such as gold or uranium, were born as a result of the extremely high temperatures that exist in the furnaces of supernovae. After their explosions, those elements were released into space, and that’s why they exist on our planet today.
Population III stars also had a similar fate, ending their lifespan after supernova explosions. Scientists analyzed a very distant quasar as it was over 13 billion years ago by using the Gemini North telescope, which is located in Hawai’i. Thus, the scientists found a cloud that had a distinct chemical signature. They detected an unusually high ratio of iron to magnesium. Therefore, they concluded that the cloud is the outcome of a first-generation star that was 300 times more massive than the Sun and got destroyed after transforming into a pair-instability supernova. That’s a much more powerful supernova than the usual ones.
Yuzuru Yoshii, who is a co-author of the research, stated as Space.com quotes:
It was obvious to me that the supernova candidate for this would be a pair-instability supernova of a Population III star, in which the entire star explodes without leaving any remnant behind,
I was delighted and somewhat surprised to find that a pair-instability supernova of a star with a mass about 300 times that of the sun provides a ratio of magnesium to iron that agrees with the low value we derived for the quasar.
While the first stars were born in the Universe only 100 million years after the Big Bang, atoms were a lot ‘luckier’. The first elements that formed were hydrogen and helium, and that was possible 380,000 after the Big Bang when the Universe cooled down enough.
