In a new study published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, a team of Spanish astronomers announced the discovery of one of the first stars to form in the Milky Way. The unevolved star, called J0815+4729, is located 7,500 light-years away in the halo of the Milky Way and likely formed just 300 million years after the Big Bang, some 13.5 billion years ago.“We know of only a few stars (which can be counted on the fingers of a hand) of this type in the halo [of the Milky Way], where the oldest and most metal-poor stars in our galaxy are found,” said David Aguado, a research student at the IAC and lead author of the study, in a press release The ancient star, which is only 70 percent the mass of the Sun, was initially identified from a dataset generated by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) — a massive survey project that has gathered deep multi-color images for about one third of sky, as well as spectra for more than three million astronomical objects. The researchers specifically selected J0815+4729 for follow-up based on its apparent lack of metals — a term which astronomers apply to any elements larger than hydrogen and helium.