TEMPO.CO, Jakarta - A team of astronomers from the Australian National University (ANU) recently discovered the oldest star known to mankind, which formed about 13.6 billion years ago, allowing scientists to learn the chemistry of the first stars in the universe.
Lead researcher Dr. Stephan Keller of the ANU's Research School of Astronomy and Astrophysics said that the discovery was made despite having one in a 60 million chance.
"I was pleasantly surprised. It was very much a needle-in-a-haystack situation," said Keller as reported by the Guardian on Tuesday, February 11, 2014.
The team found the oldest star by using a football-field-sized telescope Skymapper, which is located at the Siding Spring observatory in South Wales, as part of a project of making the first digital map of the southern sky.
Keller described the discovery as a "time capsule" since it provided new information that would challenge earlier beliefs about the first stars. He said that new stars formed after primordial stars, which had a mass of 60 times that of the sun and died in a supernova blast.
GUARDIAN | MAHARDIKA SATRIA HADI