The 13 billion year old 'grandchild' of the Big Bang rushes towards Earth

An ancient star hidden in the "killer" satellite of the galaxy containing Earth, belongs to the second generation of stars, born immediately after the "Big Bang" event.

Astrophysicist Anirudh Chiti from the University of Chicago (USA) and colleagues have identified LMC-119 , one of the oldest known stars outside the galaxy containing Earth, the Milky Way. , born just 800 million years after the Big Bang.

LMC-119 is located in a dwarf galaxy called the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), a satellite galaxy of the Milky Way.

Image from the James Webb space telescope captures 30 Doradus nebula, a region of chaotic star formation in the Large Magellanic Cloud - (Photo: NASA/ESA/CSA).

The article published in the scientific journal Nature Astronomy said that LMC-119 is currently 13 billion years old , belonging to the second generation of stars born after the Big Bang event that gave birth to the universe.

The first stars born from the post-Big Bang chaos lived and died billions of years ago, so it is impossible to directly tell the story of the early universe.

But traces of these stellar ancestors are still preserved in the second generation of stars that have formed and persist until now.

LMC-119 is exactly what scientists are looking for, because around it there are still traces of the gas and dust cloud in which it was born, which are the shredded body parts of the first generation of stars - " children of the Big Bang".

According to widely accepted theory, stars are what enrich the universe with chemistry. The first generation of stars were giant objects made up of the only elements that existed in abundance at the time: about three-quarters hydrogen and one-quarter helium.

However, the nucleus of stars is a great reactor, where heavier elements are forged.

When stars die, they will explode, releasing these heavier elements into gas and dust clouds, thereby forming new stars with more diverse compositions. These new stars continue to forge heavier elements in their nuclei.

Over many generations of stars, the universe has become extremely rich in chemistry. The Sun was able to be born with a protoplanetary disk containing a huge number of chemical elements.

Planets younger than Earth around stars born after the Sun can now possess periodic tables of hundreds of elements.

Therefore, LMC-119 is authentic evidence to prove and clarify the beginning of the theory of stellar evolution.

Some such old stars have been found in the Milky Way, but this is the first time researchers have been able to do so in another galaxy.

This ancient star was much farther away from us when it was born 13 billion years ago, up to 6 million light years away, belonging to an early galaxy that may have merged with the LMC.

The LMC galaxy itself is constantly hurling itself toward the galaxy containing Earth. Therefore, this star is currently only 160,000 light years away from us, enough for telescopes to observe.

It is expected that within 2-2.4 billion years, this toilet galaxy - including the ancient star mentioned above - will crash into the Milky Way, an event that is likely to knock Earth from its current position in Solar system.