Evidence Of Powerful Supernovae From First Stars In Our Galaxy

whole wonderful person this is Anton and today we're going to be discussing a relatively recent paper that essentially analyzed a somewhat unusual Star right here in the Milky Way galaxy a star that possessed peculiar chemical properties expected from a type of a star we've been looking for for a very long time specifically signs of what seems to be ancient remnants created by the first stars in

the entire universe or the remnant gas from population 3 stars that went supernova in the first few hundred million years after the big bang and so let's discuss some of the details from this recent paper that you can find in the description below focusing on why this is actually a pretty big Discovery and what this particular Discovery might help us solve for the first a quick

reminder on more exactly these types of stars are so today the majority of stars in the entire galaxy are the result of tens and even sometimes hundreds of different Supernova Recycling and creating a lot of new material that eventually created modern stars for example we believe that at least 4 doesn't Supernova happened in order to create our sun and we know this because of the elements

present inside the Sun and the proportions of certain elements compared to what we usually see in various gas coming from distant Supernova but naturally if you were to look back in the past at some point you're going to find some of the first stars that were created from some of the primordial gas that used to exist in the entire universe and so the scientists refer to

our sun as population 1 star and much older stars that are still in existence today but were created from maybe one or two Supernova are referred to as population 2 stars but the first stars ever are known as population 3 and based on various calculations and simulations the scientists believe that these were probably extremely different both in properties appearance and the effects they produced around the

Galaxy for example most calculations suggest that these were extremely massive usually over 100 solar masses and sometimes up to several thousand solar masses with many of these Stars possibly exist in for less than a millionaires possibly only a few thousand years emitting huge amounts of gas in the process but also eventually exploring producing powerful Supernova and maybe leaving black holes behind that part is a maybe

because this is actually one of the Mysteries the scientists are trying to solve in order of other simulations especially when it comes to stars that are only a few hundred solar masses the scientists realized that in many cases these stars are not actually going to go through very typical Supernova process at all they're going to have their own Supernova referred to as pair instability Supernova a

supernova that only occurs in relatively massive stars anywhere between 130 to maybe 260 solar masses but also stars that generally have what's known as low metallicity they essentially contain a lot of simple gases like hydrogen and helium not a word of complex gases like oxygen and carbon or basically chemically primitive stars and inside of these stars because of their mass and because of the pressure and

of course the temperature they're going to start producing using a lot of gamma rays this gamma is actually prevent the star from collapsing by creating a kind of a thermal pressure preventing the star from growing smaller and basically reaching a kind of an equilibrium with gravity but the thing is sometimes a lot of these gamma rays can also interact with sound with the gas and actually

disappear producing electron positron particles and this tends to happen in very extreme conditions and overall reduces the amount of pressure from within by just a little bit although in certain situations enough of these gamma rays can disappear potentially destabilizing the star just a little bit to decrease in size a little more but by decreasing in size the star would then have even more pressure annihilate even

more gamma rays reducing internal radiation even more and as the star grows smaller and smaller in size and the thermal pressure from within decreases at some point there are just not enough gamma rays within to support anything and the star suddenly collapses producing an extremely powerful Supernova but because of the way that the soprano is produced it actually leaves nothing behind no black hole no neutron

star absolutely nothing well it does leave a lot of gas behind and the gas that's enriched in a very specific amount of different elements but no remnant of any sword so it's as if the star never existed and we know that these types of supernova definitely seem to happen because quite a few candidates have already been discovered from really massive low mentalistic stars in a lot

of nearby galaxies here is actually an x-ray image from the Supernova detected in 2006 which was back then the brightest ever and the more recent one was detected in 2016. also very likely produced by a similar event resulting in the brightest Supernova produced but in this case these were not from population 3 stars but instead from very massive stars created from relatively low in metallicity gas

sort of mimicking what we expect from a population 3 star and interestingly one of the reasons we don't seem to see black holes more massive than approximately 60 solar masses is because of this unusual parents stability Supernova event modern theories suggest that it's actually kind of impossible to produce black holes of certain mass today it's referred to as the Black Hole Mass Gap so we expect

most black holes out there to be much lower than approximately 60 solar masses with some minor exceptions that were discussed in videos in the description so far this proposition has been correct more or less but when it comes to these very specific explosions caused by population 3 stars or hypothetical first stars in the universe the gas created by the Supernova is expected to also have very

specific elements with very specific proportions and that's because they are generally created from the same Stars massive stars full of hydrogen and helium and nothing else so we expect these explosions to follow a very similar route and produce very similar elements for example in the first few days there should be a lot of nickel 56 that should turn into Cobalt 56 which eventually turns into iron

56 and so a lot of the gas here should contain a lot of iron whereas population 3 stars themselves are also expected to be extremely bright and extremely powerful producing huge Stellar winds and a lot of emissions and well to date we've only had hints of these Stars over their existence with the biggest hint so far coming from the James Webb Space Telescope a very distant

galaxies seems to contain certain emissions of helium that is like just sort of expect from these types of stars but these are just hints and not actual evidence for their existence because there are also other explanations for these helium emissions that don't involve these first stars and so up to this point we've always believed these stars to exist but we just never seen any proof but

in this new study the scientists took a look at a star known as g1010 plus 2358 an unusual old Star located in the galactic Hilo relatively far away from the main disk and to their surprise the star contained a very intriguing chemical composition they've discovered specific ratios expected from the gas created by population 3 stars so for example by measuring the ratio of sodium to magnesium

and Cobalt to Nickel they discovered the pattern that was always predicted from population 3 stars and once again they've discovered a relatively High abundance of iron but very low abundance of sodium expected from a star that's a little bit older which by itself doesn't actually tell us that this is a population 3 star but it does tell us that the gas in the star came directly

from the ancient Supernova in other words the star that seems to be almost as old as the Galaxy itself seems to have been enriched by the gas from an ancient pair instability Supernova which was coming from a population 3 star that was approximately 260 solar masses a star that very likely exploded 13.5 billion years ago and whose massive amounts of emissions very likely created several stars

and so chances are there are quite a few Partners somewhere out there with possibly similar orbits and so it's really The Peculiar analysis of the elements inside the star that make this a very intriguing Discovery it will be practically impossible to explain this discovery in any other way in other words the elements present here cannot be explained by type 1 or type 2 Supernova but because

of the high enrichment in Iron compared to a lot of other elements it basically tells us that a lot of these second generation stars were not as metal poor as we previously believed in other words many contain quite a few complex chemicals but just not a very large variety of chemicals as many other stars like our sun that were formed billions of years after and since

the scientists have never actually seen zero metallicity Stars anywhere out there or basically stars made only out of hydrogen and helium at the moment this is the only sign we have of the existence of population 3 stars in the Milky Way galaxy although ultimately what the scientists actually want to find is a star that's maybe a little bit smaller than our sun possibly 0.7 solar masses

that contains only hydrogen only helium that's basically the Holy Grail now it's actually very difficult to find these stars because they will be extreme with him but one day hopefully this will be discouraged as well and so until the actual discovery of population 3 star or possibly some kind of an ancient Red Dwarf or brown dwarf that seems to have zero metallicity and existed for almost

as long as the universe itself at the moment this is the biggest clue we have to the existence of these first stars in the Milky Way galaxy strange Elemental properties present inside a distant star that was probably created by one of the first Supernova in the Milky Way galaxy but once we discover something else I'll make sure to follow this up with another video thank you

for watching subscribe share this with someone who's learning about space and Sciences come back tomorrow to learn something else support this channel on patreon by Julian Jenna membership all by buying a wonderful person t-shirt you can find in the description stay wonderful I'll see you tomorrow and as always bye [Music] thank you [Music] foreign