NASA's Roman Space Telescope will hunt for the universe's 1st stars — or their shredded corpses, anyway

An illustration shows a black hole ripping apart a massive star in a tidal disruption event.

NASA's forthcoming Nancy Grace Roman Telescope could use the grisly death of stars ripped apart by black holes to hunt the universe's first population of stellar bodies.

These early stars, referred to (somewhat confusingly) as Population III (Pop III) stars, were very different from the sun and other stars seen in the cosmos today. That's because the universe wasn't yet filled with "metals," the term astronomers use to describe elements heavier than hydrogen and helium.