Gravitational lens shows a galaxy just 800 million years post-Big Bang

Despite being incredibly poor in heavy elements, LAP1-B has an unusually high amount of carbon; its carbon-to-oxygen ratio is higher than our Sun’s. The researchers think the answer might lie in how these massive first-generation stars died. According to our models, when a massive, Population III star reaches the end of its life, its core collapses into a black hole, but the resulting supernova explosion isn’t energetic enough to blow the entire star apart. “Their bounding energy of gravity is stronger than in the usual massive stars,” Nakajima said. Instead, the collapse results in a faint supernova with significant fallback, in which the heavier elements from the star’s core, such as oxygen, are sucked back past the event horizon and trapped in the black hole beneath. At the same time, the lighter outer layers, which are rich in carbon, escape and are expelled into the surrounding gas. LAP1-B’s chemical makeup, with low oxygen but elevated carbon, looks like a fingerprint of a gas cloud produced by Population III stars supernovae. But there was one other clue hidden in the gas in LAP1-B, and it was all about its speed. The dark matter By looking at how the emission lines in the spectrum were broadened by the Doppler effect, Nakajima and his colleagues measured that the gas is swirling around inside the galaxy at roughly 58 kilometers per second, a rather typical value for dwarf galaxies. …