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Like people, stars can teach us a lot, but through a telescope old galaxies look young,
and old stars have iron deficiency.
[MUSIC]
Hey everyone, Trace here for DNews with our Weekly Space Update, this week was a fun week
for space -- with astronomers discovering the YOUNGEST galaxy in the universe, and the
OLDEST star in the universe! Same week, guys! Crazy.
Thirteen point seven five BILLION years ago, the Big *** happened. Then a few million
years later, the first stars formed. Just this week astronomers at The Australian National
University identified one of those first stars, and it's only 6,000 light-years away from
earth! These scientists were able to discern the QUOTE "fingerprint" of an ancient star
at the Mount Stromlo Observatory.
Basically, new stars have way more iron than ancient stars. For instance, to make a star
like our sun, you need a mass of 1,000 Earths of iron, plus a lot of hydrogen and helium.
Easy. But ancient stars have no detectable level of iron, and THIS one is very rich in
carbon! The theory is, this is a "second generation" star that formed in the wake of a primordial
star, which are 60 times the mass of our Sun. The primordial star had lots of hydrogen and
helium just like today, but when it collapsed, the ensuing black hole sucked in the iron,
leaving this characteristic fingerprint. Hopefully, this discovery will help astronomers learn
about how stars formed in the early universe, AND gives us a glimpse into the birth of everything
we know!
The youngest galaxy can ALSO teach us about the early universe, because it's not actually
young... NOW. The Hubble Space Telescope just spotted the YOUNGEST galaxy ever discovered:
Abell2744_Y1. It is SO FAR AWAY it took 13 billion years for the light to get to us.
Remember, the Big ***, 3.75 billion years ago, so the light getting to us NOW was generated
by this galaxy only 650 million years after the Big ***! It took so long for us to see
it, we're literally looking back in time to how it WAS not how it IS.
We're hoping this will help us learn how early galaxies formed in the first billion years
of the universe's existence. Scientists publishing their findings in Astronomy and Astrophysics
Letters are also hoping they can use Abell to explore dark matter. Abell2744_Y1 is 30
times smaller than the Milky Way, but has a MASSIVE amount of gravity for some reason.
The gravity is so strong, it warps space around it! It creates a strange lens, sort of like
bending glass, which causes nearby objects to look brighter than they really are. Abell2744_Y1
is also churning out at least 10 times more stars and contains a large amount of gas,
but they don't really know why.
To get as much information as they can, NASA and other astronomers are using the infrared
from the Spitzer Telescope, x-ray from the Chandra X-Ray Observatory, and the Hubble!
It's KIND OF A big deal. Discoveries like this uncover how the universe formed, why
it exists and why it looks like it does now.
Do you like astronomy? Do you know much about it? Ask your questions to our Tweet-name @DNews
or post them below in the comments! We totally read those things. Make sure you subscribe
for DNews every day of the week, and thanks for watching. See ya!