A team of scientists from the Australian National University (ANU) has discovered the oldest known star so far, with an age of about 13.6 billion years , relegating to second place the other longest-lived star that dates back to 13.2 billion. of years. The study has been published in the journal Nature .
The new star, known as SMSS J031300.36-670839.3, formed shortly after the Big Bang, and its size was 60 times the size of our Sun. It was detected using the SkyMapper telescope, located at the Siding Spring Observatory, in Australia and whose objective is to produce the first digital map of the sky seen from the southern hemisphere of the globe. The discovery has been confirmed using the Magellan telescope in Chile.
Stefan Keller, research leader at ANU, states that the star is approximately 6,000 light-years from Earth . Its discovery has been due both to its shape and its composition. The star contains practically no iron and our Sun needed for its formation almost a thousand times the mass of the Earth of this mineral.
The study of the chemical footprint of this new star will provide a more accurate view of how the first stars of the origins of the universe were and also how they died .
