MIT Physics News Spotlight When the first stars blinked on The
very first stars may have turned on when the universe was 750
million years old. Jennifer Chu, MIT News Office December 5,
2012 As far back in time as astronomers have been able to see,
the universe has had some trace of heavy elements, such as
carbon and oxygen. These elements, originally churned from the
explosion of massive stars, formed the building blocks for
planetary bodies, and eventually for life on Earth. Now
researchers at MIT, the California Institute of Technology, and
the University of California at San Diego have peered far back
in time, to the era of the first stars and galaxies, and found
matter with no discernible trace of heavy elements. To make this
measurement, the team analyzed light from the most distant known
quasar, a galactic nucleus more than 13 billion light-years from
Earth. These quasar observations provide a snapshot of our
universe during its infancy, a mere 750 million years after the
initial explosion that created