Astronomers have discovered the oldest living star in the (known) universe — and, remarkably, it’s situated right on our galactic doorstep, just 6,000 light years away, well within the Milky Way. The star, which has the abbreviated name of SM0313, was born 13.6 billion years ago — just 100 or 200 million years after the Big Bang (and a whopping 400 million years before the previous record breaker). It is believed that SM0313 is an elusive Population II star — a star that was formed from the remnants of one of the universe’s very first supernovae. By using SM0313′s spectrographic fingerprint as a baseline, we will hopefully be able to find more ancient stars, eventually allowing us to build up a better picture of what actually happened during (and before?) the Big Bang.
SM0313 (full designation SMSS J031300.36-670839.3) was first spotted by the Australian National University’s Siding Spring Observatory’s SkyMapper Telescope, which is in the process of mapping out a billion stars, galaxies, and asteroids in the southern sky. The Magellan Telescopes in Chile then followed up with some high-resolution imagery. As the astronomers took a closer look at the images, they noticed something rather odd: SM0313 contains almost no iron — less than one ten millionth of the iron found in our local Sun, in fact
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http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/176497-weve-found-the-oldest-star-in-the-known-universe-and-its-right-on-our-galactic-doorstep
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