Led by China, the first evidence of the "oldest mysteries of the universe" was found

 A study led by China has yielded the first observational evidence of life for the oldest stars in the universe. Scientists from China, Japan and Australia have discovered the unique chemical signatures of stars in the Milky Way's halo, using the combined power of two of the world's largest ground-based telescopes.

Their findings, from the Large Sky Area Multi-Object Fiber Telescope (LAMOST) near Beijing and the Subaru Telescope in Hawaii, show that so-called first-generation stars lit up the universe about 100 to 250 million years after the Big Bang.

Their study, published in the journal Nature on Wednesday, provided the first observational evidence that stars ended their lives in an unusual explosion, quite different from the supernovae we know today and only predicted theoretically until now.

Harvard theoretical physicist Avi Loeb hailed the discovery as "extremely important in confirming our theoretical ideas about the first generation of stars." Loeb said first-generation stars are among the universe's greatest unsolved mysteries. Scientists predict that it formed from primordial gas after the Big Bang and was made of just hydrogen and helium, minus the heavier elements made in the cores of later giant stars.

Astronomy theory also suggested that these ancient bodies may have had masses equivalent to hundreds of suns and experienced a unique partial outburst when their lives ended and exploded. The stars of the first generation were short-lived and difficult to detect, leaving only their chemical fingerprints in the next generation of stars.

For their pioneering study, Zhao Gang of the National Astronomical Observatories of China and colleagues sifted through the spectra of more than five million stars collected by LAMOST. At about half the mass of the Sun, and about 3,300 light-years away in the galactic halo, the star was extremely low in metals such as sodium and cobalt.