Astronomers have recently made a groundbreaking discovery: an ancient galaxy that formed shortly after the birth of the universe. Within it, there are incredibly bright stars that have existed for over 13 billion years. These stars are exceedingly rare and may hold the key to a more comprehensive understanding of how the universe came into being, as reported by the Daily Mail.
The CR7 galaxy with its extremely bright stars – (Screenshot from ESO)
The Quest for the Oldest Stars in the Universe: Today, scientific explanations regarding the Big Bang, the creation, and existence of the universe are still primarily theoretical. Scientists continue to search the endless expanse of space for the most plausible answers to these questions.
The ancient galaxy was discovered by a group of scientists led by Dr. David Dobral, affiliated with the University of Lisbon in Portugal. They utilized the Very Large Telescope (VLT) in Chile to identify this extremely luminous galaxy and named it CR7.
The VLT is a collection of four state-of-the-art astronomical telescopes arranged in a fixed structure. It was built and is operated by the European Southern Observatory (ESO) in the northern Chilean Atacama Desert.
Many of the stars within CR7 formed shortly after the Big Bang, just a few hundred million years later. Scientists categorize these stars as Population III, representing the primitive, massive stars that emerged after the Big Bang. Some of them could weigh more than 300 times the mass of our Sun.
This discovery is considered a major breakthrough, as the scientific community hopes that studying CR7 and these ancient stars will provide insights into the existence of stars and planets as we know them today.