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Population III stars
Astronomers have long theorised the existence of a first generation of stars known as Population III stars that were born out of the primordial material from the Big Bang. All the heavier chemical elements essential to life including oxygen, nitrogen, carbon and iron were forged in the bellies of stars. This means the first stars must have formed out of the only elements to exist prior to stars: hydrogen, helium and trace amounts of lithium.
These massive, brilliant, and previously purely theoretical objects were the creators of the first heavy elements in history, the elements necessary to forge the stars around us today, the planets that orbit them, and life as we know it. The newly found galaxy, named CR7, is three times brighter than the brightest distant galaxy known up to now.
Scientists theorised these Population III stars would have been enormous: several hundred or even a thousand times more massive than the Sun; blazing hot, and transient; and exploding as supernovae after only about two million years. But until now, the search for physical proof of their existence had been inconclusive.
The name
Located in the COSMOS field, an intensely studied patch of sky in the constellation of Sextans, this galaxy is three times brighter than the brightest distant galaxy known up to now. Its nickname was inspired by the Portuguese soccer player Cristiano Ronaldo (also known as CR7).
Cosmos Redshift 7 is a high-redshift galaxy (7.5), in the constellation Sextans, about 12.9 billion light travel distance years from Earth, Formed soon after the Big Bang during the reionization epoch when the Universe was about 800 million years old, CR7 is one of the oldest and most distant galaxies. CR7 is three time brighter than the brightest distant galaxy known up to its discovery.
Why population III stars?
The X-shooter and SINFONI instruments on the VLT were used to find strong ionised helium emission in CR7 but crucially and surprisingly no sign of any heavier elements in a bright pocket in the galaxy. This meant the team had discovered the first good evidence for clusters of Population III stars that had ionised gas within a galaxy in the early universe.
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