You know what time it is. It's time to ask a space man. I'm Paul Sutter. You've got questions, and I've got the answers. You know how the show works, but for old times' sake, I'm going to tell you anyway.

You go on Facebook or Twitter and use the hashtag Ask a Spaceman to ask some questions.

I hope there are questions about space.

They can be questions about personal relationships, I guess.

Maybe I'll do an episode on that, but probably not. I prefer the space

related questions. You can also go directly online to askaspaceman.com. There you'll find the show

notes. You can make comments. And you can ask questions there. And you can follow me on Facebook or

Twitter. My name is Paul Matt Sutter.

We have a very simple goal with this show.

Complete knowledge of time and space.

It's going to take a while, but we're going to do it one step at a time.

And today's question on the road to complete knowledge of time and space

is when did the first stars appear in our universe? I've mentioned in a show before that our son is about

four and a half billion years old. But the universe is older than that. The universe is around

13 billion years, give or take a billion years old. So obviously our son, our own son is not

the first star to appear in the universe. In fact, it's among the third or fourth generation of stars. We learned

before how stars can make the seeds for new stars. So a star forms, it blows up or turns into a planetary

nebula. You get a big ball of gas. and if that's set in motion, that can collapse

to form a new star and on and on and on. So stars begat other stars. But even though our sun is not

the first generation of stars, it's around the third or fourth. Astronomers, being astronomers, can't just say,

oh, this is a third generation star or a fourth generation star. Instead, our sun is classified

as what's called a population one star. And this is a little bit of cool astrolingo you can use. Our Sun is population 1. That means

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