The Students Who Found the Oldest Star: Top Photos

Two undergrads walked into an observatory on their first night and found the oldest star anyone has ever seen.

Panoramic view of the Tara Cathedrals (left) and the Tara salt flat in the Atacama Desert, northern Chile.
The Tara Cathedrals and salt flat in Chile's Atacama Desert, the stark high-altitude landscape surrounding the observatories where Ha Do analyzed the star's elemental abundances and found them "quite low for all of them" — including an undetectable carbon level that challenges theories about how the first small stars formed. © Diego Delso, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

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