A star that erupted in a “super-supernova” when the cosmos was only 100 million years old may have left chemical remnants, according to astronomers.
These Population III stars of the first generation died in massive supernova explosions that seeded the universe with the chemical elements they had formed over the course of their existence. Comprehending how these earliest stars endowed the universe with heavy metals is crucial to understanding its evolution over its 13.7 billion-year history because this material was absorbed in the subsequent generation of stars, planets, and even humankind.
In order to analyse an extremely distant quasar, which is a superbright object powered by a massive black hole, as it was 13.1 billion years ago, when the universe was only 700 million years old, a team of researchers used the 8.1-meter Gemini North telescope on the island of Hawai’i. They discovered a cloud with a distinct chemical signature surrounding the object.
When the chemical constituents of the cloud were determined, the researchers discovered an extraordinarily high ratio of iron to magnesium that was ten times higher than the same ratio in the sun. The only possible explanation for this debris cloud, according to astronomers, is that a first-generation star with a mass 300 times that of the sun burst in a supernova known as a pair-instability supernova.
