Astronomers searching the skies have spotted the oldest stars in our galactic neighbourhood, 'primitive' stars which formed just after the big bang.
Scientists from the European Southern Observatory made the discovery using a massive telescope in Chile.
Finding the most primitive stars outside the Milky Way galaxy "is crucial for our understanding of the earliest stars in the universe," ESO said in a statement.
ESO's Very Large Telescope, which found the stars, measures 8.2 metres in diameter and is installed in the Atacama desert some 1,200 kilometres north of Santiago.
According to cosmologists, primitive stars, also called "extremely metal-poor stars," formed shortly after the Big Bang, around 13.7 billion years ago.
These extremely rare stars had previously been very difficult to locate.
'No place to hide'
But a new technique allowed the astronomers to "uncover the primitive stars hidden among all the other, more common stars," said Else Starkenburg, lead author of the paper reporting the study.
"From now on there is no place left to hide!"
Team member Vanessa Hill raved about the sensational optics on the telescope.
"Compared to the vague fingerprints we had before, this would be as if we looked at the fingerprint through a microscope," she said.
Funded by 14 countries, ESO is the main intergovernmental astronomical organization in Europe.
Next year, the observatory will begin building the European Extremely Large Telescope (E-ELT), which it called the "world's biggest eye on the sky," with an unprecedented diameter measuring 42 metres.
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