Scientists have identified one of the oldest known stars outside the Milky Way. The discovery, reported in March in the journal Nature Astronomy, has uncovered a relic from the early days of the universe in the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), a satellite galaxy of the Milky Way — and it's revealing the conditions from a time before the sun even existed.
The first stars born after the Big Bang lived and died billions of years ago, so there are none left to tell the story of the early universe. But traces of these stellar ancestors were preserved in the second generation of stars that formed and still survive today.
