Antiques Roadshow

Title text: The family lore was that we've had it ever since it was ejected from a star-forming gas cloud, but it seems more likely that my great-grandparents probably just bought it while on vacation in the galactic thin disk.

Explanation[edit]

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This comic is a play of the TV show Antiques Roadshow, in which appraisers assess an item to see how valuable the item is. This comic extends it by having a star appraised, an item that doesn't normally appear on the show.^{[citation needed]}

Antiques Roadshow is a BBC series in which members of the public can have antiques assessed and valued by experts. Often there are two outcomes of the valuation: the item is a genuine antique of surprisingly high value, or the item is a modern replica and of a disappointingly low value.

In this comic, Cueball is having a star assessed. The star is not, as he had hoped, an old Population III star, but a more modern Population I star. Younger stars tend to have higher levels of iron.

Population III stars have never been directly observed. It is thought that they were very large, and formed out of gas that contained no heavy elements, such as iron. As they were large, they burnt their fuel rapidly and exploded in supernovae. These supernovae seeded the universe with the first heavy elements. The direct observation of a population III star would be a major result in astronomy, and hence very valuable. Population I stars are much more commmon. All the stars that are visible at night or during the day are population I stars.