Evolutionists think that the very first generation of stars, called Population III stars, are mostly expected to be too distant to see directly – but astronomers may have found some for the very first time. Image courtesy of NOIRLab/NSF/AURA/J. da Silva/Spaceengine/M. Zamani
Joel Kontinen
We may have finally seen the first generation of stars.
Astronomers have been looking for these primordial behemoths, called Population III stars, for decades. Now they have found what may be the most promising
candidate yet.
Population
III stars are expected to be very different from modern, or Population I,
stars, says the evolutionists. They would have formed from pristine hydrogen
and helium gas, before heavier elements were distributed throughout the
universe by supernovae and powerful stellar winds. They are also
expected to be bigger and hotter than modern stars.
That is exactly what Eli Visbal at
the University of Toledo in Ohio and his colleagues found when they did a
detailed analysis of previous James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) observations of
a distant galaxy called LAP1-B. It is at a redshift – a number that astronomers
use to measure distance – of 6.6, which means we see LAP1-B as it was just
about 800 million years after the big bang. That is so far away the only reason
we could spot it at all is because its light was magnified by a nearer galaxy
cluster in a process called gravitational
lensing.
“There should be tons and tons of these all over the
observable universe, but we can only look sort of under the lamppost of this
cluster that’s magnifying the light,” says Visbal. When he and his team calculated how many
Population III star clusters we should find at this redshift, they found that
it should be about one – which is what they saw..
Another point in LAP1-B’s favour is it only seems to have
enough stars to make up a few thousand times the mass of the sun. Other
candidates for Population III galaxies tend to have much higher stellar
masses, inconsistent with simulations of how clusters of
Population III stars form. “This is the best candidate we have so far,” says
Visbal.
Most Population III stars are expected to have lived and
died between about 100 and 400 million years after the big bang, after which
there would have been enough heavy
elements in the cosmos to form stars that are more similar to the ones
we see today. “This object ticks many of the boxes, but I am a bit sceptical
because it’s late in the game for these stars to be around, and there may
be alternatives that might do the job as well,” says Ralf Klessen at Heidelberg University in
Germany. “It would be super interesting to see a Population III star cluster,
but statistically this would certainly be an outlier.”
“[For
these to be Population III stars], it must be an extremely lucky combination of
different factors, each of them extremely rare on its own, and much more rare
when they have to happen together.” It will take deeper observations and
more detailed simulations to find out for sure if LAP1-B marks the first time
we have seen these strange stars.
This is important because understanding Population III stars
is crucial to figuring out how and when the first heavy elements formed. “They
can tell us how the chemistry of the universe evolved from just hydrogen and
helium to all the cool chemistry and life and everything that we have in
the universe today,” says Visbal. Population III stars were the first building
blocks of the complexity that surrounds us now.
Source:
Leah Crane 2025 We may have found a surprisingly nearby cluster of primordial stars | New Scientist 3 November