An Indian-origin student was among a group of scientists, including other undergraduate students at the University of Chicago, that recently discovered what is being billed as one of the oldest stars in our universe. According to UChicago News, the groundbreaking interstellar findings were reported in a study published by Nature Astronomy on April 3 (US time).
Alexander Ji, an assistant professor of astronomy and astrophysics at UChicago, is listed as the first author on the study. Meanwhile, the students involved in identifying the star named SDSS J0715−7334, which resides about 80,000 light-years away, were Pierre Thibodeaux, a graduate student at UChicago and co-author on the study, undergrads Selenna Mejias-Torres, Zhongyuan Zhang, and Indian-origin Rithika Tudmilla, among others.
Graduate student Hillary Diane Andales and postdoctoral researcher Guilherme Limberg were also part of the study, which used the resources of UChicago’s Research Computing Centre.
How did University of Chicago students discover one of the oldest stars in the universe?
Also described as the “most chemically pristine star yet known in the universe,” the newly discovered star formed long before our sun or Earth in the first several billion years after the Big Bang, according to UChicago News. As part of his research into such stars formed right after the Big Bang, Alexander Ji put his students to the test during an undergraduate astronomy field course.
Focused on making actual scientific observations, the class looked through star catalogs made by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. They ultimately searched for stars with anomalous readings. The less of an accumulation of heavy elements a star has, the older it must be, UChicago News reported.
As part of their study, the students identified a few of “candidate stars.” Thereafter, they went to the Magellan Telescopes at Carnegie Science’s Las Campanas Observatory in the remote mountains of Chile during their spring break of 2025 to narrow down detailed measurements using powerful telescopes.
“According to the team’s analysis, it had just half the amount of heavy elements measured in the previous record-holder, making it the oldest-known star by a wide margin,” the report said of the star named SDSS J0715−7334. “They also found it is a galactic immigrant, originally formed elsewhere but currently being pulled into the Milky Way.”
Their study, accepted by Nature Astronomy, further summarised, “This star is over ten times more chemically pristine than the most extreme high-redshift galaxies currently found by the James Webb Space Telescope.”
Indian-origin student from University of Chicago discovers ‘most chemically pristine’ star
Rithika Tudmilla was the Indian-origin UChicago student who worked on the study.
According to her LinkedIn bio, she is a fourth-year undergraduate at the University of Chicago, working for her B.S. in Astrophysics and minoring in Computer Science. Beyond the world of academia and her passion for “helping humanity accumulate knowledge of the universe,” she also identifies as an artist, dancer, circus performer, writer, and martial artist.