Latest HE0107-5240 Stories

After years of successful concealment, the most primitive stars outside our Milky Way galaxy have finally been unmasked. New observations using ESO's Very Large Telescope have been used to solve an important astrophysical puzzle concerning the oldest stars in our galactic neighborhood "” which is crucial for our understanding of the earliest stars in the Universe."We have, in effect, found a flaw in the forensic methods used until now," says Else Starkenburg, lead author of the paper...

A primitive star with extremely low iron content has been discovered by an international research team from Sweden, Japan, Germany, USA, Australia and Great Britain. This indicates the original composition of the gas from which the star formed had low iron content. The results are published in Nature online this week. In 2001, the giant star HE0107-5240 was discovered among a large number of stars examined as part of the Hamburg/ESO* survey. Detailed studies revealed that the star had by far...