Astronomers find oldest nearby stars

AAP

EUROPEAN Southern Observatory astronomers said on Wednesday they had uncovered the oldest stars in our galactic neighbourhood thanks to a massive telescope installed 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 measures 8.2 metres in diameter and is installed in the Atacama desert about 1200 kilometres north of Santiago, located the stars.

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 been difficult to locate. But a new technique allowed the European 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 organisation in Europe.

Next year, the observatory will begin building the European Extremely Large Telescope, which it called the "world's biggest eye on the sky," with an unprecedented diameter measuring 42 metres (138 feet).