Welcome to Quantum Magazine's podcast.

Each episode we bring you stories about developments in science and mathematics.

I'm Susan Vallett.

A group of astronomers pouring over data from the James Webb Space Telescope

has glimpsed light from ionized helium in a distant galaxy.

It could indicate the presence of the universe's very first generation of stars.

That's next.

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The stars that the astronomers spotted in the James Webb Space Telescope data are long sought

after and inaptly named Population 3 stars.

They would have been enormous balls of hydrogen and helium sculpted from the universe's primordial gas.

Theorists started imagining these first fireballs in the 1970s, hypothesizing that after short

lifetimes, they exploded as supernovas, forging heavier elements and spewing them into the cosmos.

That star stuff later gave rise to population two stars, more abundant in heavy elements, than even richer population one stars,

like our sun, as well as planets, asteroids, comets, and eventually life itself.

Rebecca Boller, an astronomer at the University of Manchester in the United Kingdom,

says we exist, so we know there must have been a first generation of stars.

Now, Xin Wang, an astronomer at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing,

and his colleagues think

they found them.

It's really surreal.

...