Laura is a science news writer, covering a wide variety of subjects, but she is particularly fascinated by all things aquatic, paleontology, nanotechnology, and exploring how science influences daily life. Laura is a proud former resident of the New Jersey shore, a competitive swimmer, and a fierce defender of the Oxford comma.
A team from Massachusetts Institute of Technology have discovered three of the oldest stars in the universe. To their surprise, the stars were not in some far off galaxy that only the ultra-powerful James Webb Space Telescope can spot. They are in our own galactic neighborhood inside the Milky Way’s “halo,” according to a study published May 14 in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
The class was searching for ancient stars that formed soon after the big bang–about 13.8 billion years ago. This was when the universe was mostly made of helium and hydrogen and did not have large amounts of other chemical elements like barium and strontium. The class combed through data collected by Frebel over the years from the Magellan-Clay telescope at the Las Campanas Observatory in Chile.
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