First Stars Found: Webb Peers into the Universe's Childhood ⚡ экспресс
Using the James Webb Space Telescope, scientists have found a star from the first generation — like a fossil from the universe's youth. It's visible thanks to a gravitational lens that magnified the distant light. Its properties strikingly match what astronomers expected from the very first stars. Could we be peering into the dawn of time?
The space telescope James Webb has for the first time caught light from stars of pure hydrogen and helium — just what the very first stars after the Big Bang are believed to have been made of. A giant cluster of galaxies MACS J0416 helped to see them: its gravity acted as a cosmic magnifying glass, amplifying the faint glimmer of the distant galaxy LAP1-B.
The newborn stars inside it fit theoretical predictions perfectly. They arise in tiny clumps of dark matter — the invisible framework of the cosmos. Each star is a true heavyweight, a hundred times more massive than the Sun, while the whole cluster weighs in at only a couple of thousand solar masses. Some of them have already exploded as supernovae, enriching the surrounding gas with heavier elements.
Here's the twist: the very, very first stars ignited even earlier, but their light is so faint that even Webb couldn't spot them. LAP1-B isn't the absolute beginning, but a rare chance to see an almost pristine past. According to calculations, only one such object appears in the entire sky.
🎯 The gas temperature in the 'cradles' of these stars was lower than in a pizza oven — just about a thousand degrees, which by cosmic standards is very cold.