Astronomers May Have Just Found Evidence of The Very First Stars in Our Universe - ScienceAlert

Back when the Universe was young – around 13.7 billion years ago – the first stars formed in the soupy darkness, setting the cosmos alight.

"We are in the presence of a secondary star with exceptional chemical characteristics: Low in iron, AS0039 is not even rich in carbon and has an extremely low amount of magnesium compared to other heavier elements, such as calcium," Skúladóttir explains in a press statement machine-translated from Italian.

And that means stars that are very poor in heavy elements.

Before stars formed, you see, there were no heavy elements in the Universe; it was a soup of mostly hydrogen and helium.

These elements, scattered throughout the Universe, were then taken up into subsequent generations of stars born from cosmic gas and dust.

So, if we find stars that are relatively low in metals, that means the star must be quite old, from a time before metals were abundant.