The 1st stars in the universe formed earlier than thought

The first stars in the universe formed even earlier than astronomers had thought, a new study suggests.

more…

Without wanting to rain on anyone’s parade, the lack of evidence before 500 million years might just mean the model is wrong…

dv said:

Without wanting to rain on anyone’s parade, the lack of evidence before 500 million years might just mean the model is wrong…

> Population III stars were the first suns to form in our 13.8-billion-year-old universe. Gravitational lensing to bring their hard targets into view. It has taken the light from these background galaxies 12.8 billion to 13.3 billion years to reach Earth — meaning that these objects are time capsules harboring lots of information about the early universe, including what types of stars were shining back then. We found no evidence of these first-generation Population III stars in this cosmic time interval.

Fair enough.

> Population III stars and the first galaxies must therefore be older still

Not necessarily. Population III stars may just have a short lifespan. Population III stars can evolve into population II stars in as short a timespan as 1 million years. A better measure would be the evolution of total metallicity with time rather than the more arbitrary division into population I, II and III. But perhaps they’ve already done that.