Keck finding: did stars predate galaxies?
In astronomy, one maxim has always seemed to hold true: Stars reside in galaxies. But new observations with the world’s largest optical telescope suggest that the first generation of stars formed more than a billion years before galaxies. Antoinette Songaila and her colleagues base this tentative conclusion on a study of heavy elements–atoms heavier than helium–in gas clouds that fill the space between galaxies several billion light-years from Earth. The team, from the University of Hawaii in Honolulu, finds that the clouds aren’t pristine reservoirs of …
