Hi, and welcome to Cosmos Quickly.

This is Lee Billings.

And this is Karen Leone.

Karen, thanks so much for being here.

A quick question for you.

What's super duper bright and hundreds, or even thousands of times heavier than our

entire solar system, yet it's so hard to find that it has yet to be directly seen?

Hmm.

It's not a good riddle.

The answer, though, is a population-three star.

That's a astronomer-lingo for the very first stars in the universe, which formed from

dense clouds of pristine hydrogen and helium that filled the cosmos in the first few hundred

million years after the Big Bang.

Those conditions should have allowed population-three stars to bulk up to proportions impossible

for more chemically enriched modern-day stars to achieve.

Great.

Okay.

And these massive stars were also foundational for everything else we see in the

universe today, right?

So they were important cosmic ingredients that set the table for the evolution of things

like galaxies and black holes, other types of stars, planets, and of course us.

Right.

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