Stars began appearing right after the Big Bang

 

Image courtesy of ESA/ATG medialab/ESO/S. Brunier. 

Joel Kontinen

When scientist age things in the millions f years, a small mistake can bring great results.  Now, they are certain that the Milky Way's 'thick disk' is 2 billion years older than scientists thought ,

Now, “ scientists inferred the ages of roughly 250,000 stars in the Milky Way using brightness, positional and chemical composition data gathered by two powerful telescopes: the European Space Agency's (ESA) orbiting Gaia observatory, and the Large Sky Area Multi-Object Fiber Spectroscopic Telescope (LAMOST) in China.”

They “discovered that thousands of stars in a part of the Milky Way known as the "thick disk" began forming some 13 billion years ago — 2 billion years earlier than expected, and just 0.8 billion years after the Big Bang.”

 Sometimes, some stars are older that the Big Bang.  

 Source:  

Specktor, Brandon. 2022. The Milky Way's 'thick disk' is 2 billion years older than scientists thought Live Science 30 March