Are the first stars in the universe still around?

It has been a long standing prevailing view that the very first stars that lit the early universe had all burned out due in part to their immense size. A new study seems to contradict this position.

It now seems quite possible that some of the universe’s first stars may still be shining in the Milky Way 13 billion years after being formed.

A new series of simulations at the University of Heidelberg in Germany seem to indicate that gases in the early universe could have produced many small stars instead of a few very large ones. It is also speculated that in these tightly packed collection of small stars, a few would have been ejected due in part to gravity dynamics. If this happened then the smaller cooler stars could have miserly with their fuel and instead of burning up in a few million years, still be going to the present day.

These results are far from being widely accepted in the astrophysical community. Many researchers say they have several qualms about those conclusions.

From the ScienceNews article

• If any of the first stars did survive until today, their brightness wouldn’t require an exceptionally large telescope to image them, says Simon White of the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics,... But making a positive ID won’t be easy, he adds. Only high-resolution spectra could distinguish primordial stars, which would contain only hydrogen and helium, from slightly younger stars containing trace amounts of heavier elements, he notes.

read complete ScienceNews article here

Scientist Discover Star That Can't Exist

Tim Sayell brings to my attention a recently discovered star that is a very strange beast indeed. Up to this point scientist have put an upper limit on how massive a star can be. It had been determined that stars larger than 150 solar masses (150 times the size of our sun) could not exist. The reason? The energy that the core of a star produces exerts massive forces on the outer layers of a star's atmosphere. With out it, a star would collapse. However any larger than 150 sols and the force of the core will push the star apart and do so quite violently.

All was well until scientists recently discovered a star more than 300 solar masses, and no it has not and is not showing any signs of exploding!

From the device article:

• The massive star is in a cluster of equally-massive stars called R136. Many of the young stars in this cluster were greater than 150 solar masses at birth, tens of times larger and several million times brighter. This particular one appears to have been born at a whopping 320 solar masses before shrinking to its current observable size of 265 solar masses. (stars shrink? who knew! pac)

From the Yahoo article:

• Still, the mass of R136a1 and its ilk means they're tens of times bigger than the Earth's sun and they're brighter and hotter, too.
• Surface temperatures can surpass 40,000 degrees Celsius (72,000 degrees Fahrenheit), seven times hotter than the sun. They're also several million times brighter.....

Still, massive stars do not enjoy long lives as compared to yellow dwarf or cooler stars. Usually only a few million years, making them extremely rare stars and very difficult to find R136 is in all likelihood already in late middle age and is in the process of blowing off huge amounts of mass.