If this is verified, it's the end of one of the biggest searches in all of astrophysics and the start of a whole new universe of scientific exploration and discovery.
The James Webb Space Telescope may have just found the first stars in the universe - from when it was only about 400 million years old (today, it’s around 13.7 billion years old).
Researchers call them Population III (or Pop III) stars, because sometimes astronomers name things in reverse for some reason. Pop III are the oldest stars, Pop II are in the middle, and Pop I are the newest. Our Sun is a Pop I star.
Crucially, this has nothing to do with how far along a star is in its individual life cycle. Think of it more like generations - if Pop I are the equivalent of Gen Z stars, Pop III are the boomers. And we’ve never seen a boomer star. Technically, we don’t know for sure that they ever existed.
Until, perhaps, now. An international team just announced in a new paper that they have found the first evidence of Pop III stars with the help of JWST. The detection still needs to be peer-reviewed and also needs to be followed up in order to be confirmed - which will require future JWST time. That’s a hot commodity, and not easy to get, but the team is going to follow up on their observations as availability allows.
If this is eventually confirmed as the first true detection of a Pop III star, it unlocks a whole new universe of scientific exploration and discovery.