Astronomers at the Australian National University have discovered the oldest star in the universe. The star, called SMSS J031300.362670839.3, is 13.8 billion years old, having formed only several hundred million years after the Big Bang. Located in our own Milky Way galaxy, the star is 6,000 light-years from Earth.
The star was formed from the remnants of a low-energy supernova. That supernova resulted from a primordial star 60 times more massive than the Sun.
According to lead scientist Stefan Keller, of the ANU Research School of Astronomy and Astrophysics, the lack of any detectable level of iron in the spectrum of light emerging from the star was a major indicator of its age. Because iron is formed within stars themselves, the destruction and successive rebirth of stars enriches them with more and more iron content. The lower the iron content in a star’s light spectrum, the older it is.
Keller and his team found SMSS J031300.362670839.3 by using the ANU SkyMapper telescope. SkyMapper is surveying the sky at the Siding Spring Observatory in Australia to produce the first-ever digital map of the sky in the Southern Hemisphere. They confirmed their observations using the Magellan telescope in Chile.
The full results are detailed in the journal Nature.
Source: Space.com