Evidence of one of the universe's oldest stars discovered

The discovery was made using a technique called stellar archaeology by Dr Wako Aoki and his colleagues at the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan in Tokyo using the Subaru Telescope on Mauna Kea, Hawaii, according a report in Nature.
It is thought first-generation stars were the first to fuse hydrogen and helium into heavier elements that would come to make up other objects like planets, and other stars.They are so old that they would have preceded most galaxies in the universe, but owing to their huge mass they lived lives of just a few million years.
           Scientists believe the universe began in the Big Bang 13.8 billion years ago, but 800 million years later almost all of the first-generation stars had exploded in supernovae. Little is known about these stars, but now the chemical signature of one has been found in one of younger siblings. When they exploded as supernovae, they created the first heavy elements that would ultimately lead to stars and galaxies.
            The evidence for this early star came in the remnants of a second-generation star called SDSS J0018-0939.
             Observations of its chemical composition suggest it formed from a cloud of gas seeded with material from the explosion of a single, more massive star - namely, a first-generation star.‘The impact of very-massive stars and their explosions on subsequent star formation and galaxy formation should be significant,’ Dr Aoki told Space.com.Naoki Yoshida, an astrophysicist at the University of Tokyo who was not involved in the study, added in Nature: ‘This is a much awaited discovery.’
            ‘It seems Aoki et al. have finally found an old relic that shows intriguing evidence that there really was such a monstrous star in the distant past.’
Second-generation stars are small, low-mass stars that have been around for about 13 billion years.Their tiny levels of heavier elements suggest that they coalesced from the remnants of much larger, first-generation stars.While the Big Bang is thought to have happened about 13.8 billion years ago, evidence for stars in the first few hundred million years of the universe's existence has been hard to come by.
           However, their existence has been inferred through the appearance of heavy elements after the Big Bang.Some elements in the universe could only originate in the cores of stars through the fusing of helium and hydrogen - and it must have been the elusive first-generation of stars that carried out the process.But until now, studies had failed to reveal the existence of these huge stars.
           Further studies will be needed to confirm these findings are correct, but Dr Aoki and his team are hopeful that this could be a precursor to similar discoveries, perhaps with the help of Nasa's James Webb Space Telescope after it launches in 2018.