These early stars may have blown up in a more violent and asymmetric fashion than previously thought.
The universe’s first stars were immense, very short-lived fireballs of hydrogen and helium gas, which formed a few hundred million years after the big bang. Scientists have long thought that their lives quickly came to end in cataclysmic explosions known as supernovae that were spherical in shape.
The team came to their conclusions after observing one of these ancient surviving stars—known as HE 1327-2326—with NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope for two weeks in 2016. With the help of an instrument which can measure the abundance of various elements within a star, they noticed that HE 1327-2326 contained high amounts of zinc, which could have originated from an asymmetric explosion of one of the very first stars.
“This changes our understanding of how the first stars exploded,” Rana Ezzeddine, lead author of the study, said in the statement. In an attempt to explain the unusual composition of HE 1327-2326, the team conducted thousands of computer simulations of supernovae explosions. These tests revealed that the only scenario that could explain its makeup was an asymmetrical supernova of an early star shooting out jets of material.
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