Chemical traces from the universe's first stars were discovered by astronomers in the halo surrounding the Milky Way galaxy, a new study reports.

These new findings, published in the journal Science, said scientists have discovered an early massive stellar fossil that could have been one of the universe's oldest stars.

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Although scientists have not observed the old star directly, they believe the star ended its stellar life after it went supernova, obliterating it.

According to Wako Aoki, lead author of the study and from the National Observatory of Japan, this star is unique from all the others because it has a very peculiar chemical pattern not found in previous stars before.

Scientists have concluded the existence of this ancient star from another star that formed right after the ancient star's explosion. The data was collected by Japan's Subaru telescope found on Hawaii's Mauna Kea volcano as part of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey.

There were models of the early universe that predicted the existence of colossal stars but there hasn't been any evidence to back this up, until now.

These first generation stars were believed to have had shorter lifetimes, about one million years. When they died, they exploded into massive supernovae that spread chemical elements throughout space such as carbon, oxygen, iron and magnesium formed from a nuclear fusion of hydrogen and helium.

These first stars were believed to be much larger than our stars today and scientists think they were 140 times larger than our sun.

Scientists have studied a sample from a low-mass star that was a remnant of an ancient star 1,000 light years away from Earth called SDS J0018-0939.

The single star was chosen out of 150 samples of stars using high-resolution spectroscopy that determines its compositions via wavelengths. The elements are represented by colors of the wavelengths and this single star was missing some colors, scientists observed.

According to Aoki, the low content of these heavy elements suggests the star is quite ancient, as old as 13 billion years where the Big Bang took place around 13.8 billion years ago.

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