"Discoveries like this are cosmic archaeology, uncovering rare stellar fossils that preserve the fingerprints of the universe's first stars.
Scientists have adopted the role of "cosmic archaeologists" to discover a rare, iron-deficient second-generation star — essentially a fossil record of our universe's chemical evolution.
The second generation, or POP II, star was discovered in the dwarf galaxy Pictor II, located around 150,000 light-years from Earth in the constellation Pictor, using the Dark Energy Camera (DECam) mounted atop Víctor M. Blanco 4-meter Telescope. Designated PicII-503, the star has only 1/40,000th of the iron contained within the sun, which is a third-generation, or (somewhat confusingly) POP I, star.
