Inside the halo of our Milky Way galaxy, astronomers have discovered the tiny, ancient star J0023 + 0307. At first glance, it may seem that for its age and location, this is a completely ordinary star. However, having studied the object more closely, a group of international researchers found out one very interesting detail - the object did not have a carbon footprint. This is so unusual that the scientists who studied it stated that such a star simply should not exist. Research scientists published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters.
Now they have discovered another amazing feature of this object. It turned out that the star has a high lithium content. By itself, this circumstance for old stars is not something unusual and occurs quite often, however, according to the researchers, the object J0023 + 0307 was formed in the first 300 million years after the Big Bang, immediately after the very first generation of stars began to die. … And this is where the oddities begin.
When the universe first formed about 13.8 billion years ago, only the lightest elements naturally formed. These include hydrogen and helium, as well as very small amounts of lithium and beryllium. The process by which these elements were formed from the primary sea of neutrons, protons, electrons, positrons, photons and neutrinos is called Big Bang nucleosynthesis.
Heavy elements, in turn, appeared later, forming inside the first stars under the influence of colossal pressure and temperature. When the first generation of stars began to die, these elements were thrown into outer space and captured by clusters of new young stars. It is this fact that allows astronomers to quite accurately determine the age of a particular star. For example, if a star does not contain a large amount of heavy elements (stars with a low metal content or EMP), then it is a clear sign that the star was formed back in the days when there were simply no such substances in the Universe. The study of J0023 + 0307 showed that it contains a thousand times less iron than our Sun, which makes it one of the stars with the lowest iron content among the known luminaries.
Despite this circumstance, it contains about the same amount of lithium as other related stars. And this is very unusual.
In ordinary stars, where the core temperature required for hydrogen synthesis reaches 2.5 million degrees, lithium is simply destroyed. There have been cases when larger stars retained some lithium supply inside the colder, outer layers of the star's atmosphere. But in small, hot stars, lithium has never been encountered before.
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The researchers hypothesize that ancient, low-metal stars are cooler than younger ones. It is possible that J0023 + 0307 contains lithium, which was formed during the nucleosynthesis of the Big Bang. If this assumption is correct, then future research in this direction will shed light on the main mystery of the universe - the mystery of its appearance.