Telltale evidence gathered by the James Webb Space Telescope suggests we're closer than ever before to finding elusive Population III stars
The James Webb Space Telescope was built primarily to transform our understanding of the early universe. Less than a year after it was switched on, it is delivering, finding galaxies earlier in the universe than any seen before. Yet the telescope has another, less publicized goal in probing those earliest moments after the big bang 13.8 billion years ago.
Those short lifetimes have made tracking down Population III stars difficult but not impossible. Some clouds of primordial gas should have persisted for some time after the big bang, perhaps hundreds of millions of years. Meanwhile the immense heat of the stars, about 90,000 degrees Fahrenheit on their surface—10 times that the temperature of our sun—should give off a telltale hint of helium that could only have been produced at such temperatures.
Vanzella’s team takes a different approach. Using the gravitational bulk of a galaxy cluster called MACS J0416, the team detected what appears to be a magnified emission of hydrogen and a small amount of oxygen from a very small and very remote galaxy. “It’s magnified by a factor of maybe 500,” says Mark Dickinson of the National Science Foundation’s National Optical-Infrared Astronomy Research Laboratory in Arizona, who is a co-author of the paper.
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