Earliest stars lived short, fiery lives

摘要

The first stars may have been big shots that went out in a blaze of glory. An ancient star has revealed new insights into a long-extinct species of primordial stars. This group, sometimes called population Ⅲ stars, were the first to form in the early universe. They forged the first elements heavier than the hydrogen and helium made in the big bang. Then they exploded as supemovae, expelling these elements into the surroundings, to become the stuff of the next generation of stars. But precisely how this happened depends on the masses of these first stars. Computer models suggested they could have been up to 100 times our sun's mass, so would die too fast to forge anything heavier than iron. But they could also have been as light as 10 solar masses and longer-lived.