Spinners

According to astronomers, the first stars after the Big Bang behaved kind of funny.

They were short-lived for stars, with lifetimes measured in the hundreds of millions of years instead of billions. This generally indicates very large stars, with the smallest being ten times the mass of our sun. Such a star would swallow the inner planets, including us, if it were to replace our own sun. Very large stars burn through their hydrogen and helium fuel much faster than smaller stars do, for which we can be thankful because the longer endurance gives life time to show up.

But when astronomers studied the leftovers of these gigantic early stars -- think pathologists only using telescopes and other instruments, studying things billions of light years away that have been dead longer than the Earth's been around -- they found that the remnants of these massive stars also showed signs that only match the smaller stars like our sun. And again, as mentioned before, the smaller stars last longer and that didn't fit the window of time necessary for these stars to have blown up and scattered their elements throughout the universe. We know they did this because those other atoms currently exist, look through telescopes and write blog posts.

Aha, scientists said! What if these gigantic stars also spun at a very fast rate? Computer simulations, conducted by several scientists including the wonderfully-named Urs Frischknecht, say that could solve the problem and this possibility warrants more study. These "spinstars" could have affected the way galaxies form and a good deal of the appearance of our modern universe.

Should the remains are studying emit an audio signal something like this, it will be considered pretty convincing evidence that they are in fact spinners -- er, spinstars.