Briley Lewis (she/her) is a freelance science writer and Ph.D. Candidate/NSF Fellow at the University of California, Los Angeles studying Astronomy & Astrophysics. Follow her on Twitter @briles_34 or visit her website www.briley-lewis.com.
ArticleBody:Telescopes are time machines, and astronomers are using them to find the first stars ever formed in the universe. These early generations of stars, known as Population III stars, were crucial to shaping the universe we know today. Back in the early days of the cosmos, there were no stars to light up the universe yet.
can’t reach back to the very beginning of the universe, but it can get pretty far—back to just a billion years after the universe began, in the epoch of reionization. Although Population III stars were totally alive at that time, they started to be hidden amongst the more “normal” stars, the next generation known as Population II.
, they hope to rely on some extra magnification from the universe itself—gravitational lensing, where light bends around massive objects in space—but that approach requires a bit of luck.
, known as Earendel. This star is from less than a billion years after the big bang, and was only visible thanks to one of those handy gravitational lenses. There’s still a lot more work to be done, however, before astronomers are confident they’ve really found the first generation of stars; “no conclusive evidence has yet been found for Earendel being Population III,” says Hegde.
is sure to continue searching, though, and perhaps we’ll finally see a stellar ancestor clearly in the coming years, illuminating our understanding of reionization just as they illuminated the early cosmos.
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