Cosmic Oddity: Rare Second-Gen Star Found Beyond the Milky Way

New hints about the origins of the universe’s elements have been revealed by stars from the Large Magellanic Cloud.
The universe was forever changed by the first generation of stars. Within their cores, basic hydrogen and helium fused into a diverse array of elements. When these stars met their end, they exploded, scattering these new elements throughout the cosmos. The iron in your veins, the calcium in your teeth, and the sodium powering your thoughts were all born in the heart of a long-dead star.

No one has been able to find one of those first generation of stars, but scientists have announced a unique finding: a star from the second generation that originally formed in a different galaxy from ours.

“This star provides a unique window into the very early element-forming process in galaxies other than our own,” said Anirudh Chiti, a University of Chicago postdoctoral fellow and first author on a paper announcing the findings. “We have built up an idea of the how these stars that were chemically enriched by the first stars look like in the Milky Way, but we don’t yet know if some of these signatures are unique, or if things happened similarly across other galaxies.”