Swiss researchers looked back some 13.4 billion years using the James Webb Space Telescope and found stars 10,000 times more massive than the Sun.

Scientists at the University of Geneva have discovered the first direct evidence of millions of massive stars at the dawn of the universe. The mass of these objects was about 10,000 times that of the Sun. Scientific publication about it is Astronomy and astrophysics appeared in its columns.

The stars, which the researchers considered only as celestial monsters, could have been born barely 440 million years after the Big Bang. The discovery — which scientists owe to NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope — may help us understand how the young universe evolved.

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Corine Charbonnel, an astronomer at the University of Geneva, and her team discovered the chemical signatures of giant stars in globular clusters, that is, a globular collection of stars. It often consists of millions of stars. Because globular clusters are so old, researchers like to study them to learn more about the early universe.

Based on the astronomers’ measurements, a large amount of nitrogen was surrounding the star cluster, which is only possible if the hydrogen burns at a very high temperature. Something like this could happen in the cores of massive stars.

Interestingly, although the globular clusters formed from the same cloud of dust and gas 13.4 billion years ago, the proportions of the elements in the stars are very different. Scientists hypothesize that this is due to massive stars burning their fuel at much higher temperatures. Thanks to this, they were able to produce heavier elements, which eventually got into smaller stars, which are so common today – he concludes Interesting geometry.

The researchers believe their discovery can help us understand how the first heavy elements in the universe were formed.

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