Complex Numbers

A Star is Born

Not a lot I can say about this one; I just thought it was too cool not to share.

Before I get into it, though, a quick note: I'll be participating in "Journalistic Intentions"  [18+] this month (though not today). Check it out and join in—you have nothing to lose and everything to gain. Well, a couple of awards to gain, potentially, but that's not nothing.

And now, let there be light.

     Astronomers Say They Have Spotted the Universe’s First Stars  
Theory has it that “Population III” stars brought light to the cosmos. The James Webb Space Telescope may have just glimpsed them.

A group of astronomers poring over data from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has glimpsed light from ionized helium in a distant galaxy, which could indicate the presence of the universe’s very first generation of stars.

Don't worry; the article later explains this better later on.

These long-sought, inaptly named “Population III” stars would have been ginormous balls of hydrogen and helium sculpted from the universe’s primordial gas.

I guess "ginormous" is a scientific term now, probably along with "bajillion" and "metric shit-ton." As in, there were a bajillion ginormous stars in the early Universe, and each one weighed a shit-ton.

Theorists started imagining these first fireballs in the 1970s, hypothesizing that, after short lifetimes, they exploded as supernovas, forging heavier elements and spewing them into the cosmos.

"Fireballs" is misleading, but "exploded" is apt.

That star stuff later gave rise to Population II stars more abundant in heavy elements, then even richer Population I stars like our sun, as well as planets, asteroids, comets and eventually life itself.

Got that? Summary: Pop III came before Pop II which came before Pop I. No idea what they're going to name the fourth generation of stars. Population X, I hope. If this seems backwards, it's because the classification system was developed before people figured out the order of things. Again, the article explains this later.

The early Universe was mostly hydrogen, some helium, a tiny bit (relatively speaking) of lithium, and not much else. It takes nuclear fusion or other processes to create the rest of the elements. This is why we say we're made of star material.

Confirmation is still needed; the team’s paper, posted on the preprint server arxiv.org on December 8, is awaiting peer review at Nature.

Important disclaimer, so you can be That Person at the party when someone gushes about how astronomers found the first star or something.

Because they are so far away and existed so briefly, finding evidence for them has been a challenge.

Remember, we're at the center of an inside-out universe; what's furthest away is oldest. Well. We appear to be at the center, anyway; so does every other point in the Universe.

The rest of the article goes into more depth, and while it's not nearly as paradigm-shattering as, say, detecting life on another world (a subject I've tackled in here before), getting confirmation, or even negation, of this model of the history of star formation would be a step forward in astronomy and cosmology. Thus, the cool factor.