Word.ws English Dictionary

Population III

Population III proper noun: a hypothetical population or group of stars which may have existed in the early history of the Universe, characterized by being extremely massive and hot and having an extremely low metallicity.

Proper noun (1)

Population III

  1. (attributive, usually) A hypothetical population or group of stars which may have existed in the early history of the Universe, characterized by being extremely massive and hot and having an extremely low metallicity.
    • In other words, we have not yet discovered a true Population III star; revealing these elusive, early stars is one of the main science goals of the soon-to-be-launched James Webb Space Telescope.2019 October 26, Ethan Siegel, “Ask Ethan: How Many Generations Of Stars Formed Before Our Sun?”, in Forbes, archived from the original on 12 Nov 2020
    • Thus, the earliest stars – known as Population III – were likely composed of just hydrogen and helium.2022 November 9, Brandon Vigliarolo, “This ancient quasar may be the remains of the first-gen star that started us all”, in The Register, archived from the original on 13 Dec 2022

Proper noun (2) capitalized: population III

population III

  1. Alternative letter-case form of Population III.

Forms of Population III

alternative formpopulation III

Origin of Population III

Proposed as a category of stars of even poorer metallicity than Population II.

Words formed from Population III

Questions about Population III

What does Population III mean?
Population III means a hypothetical population or group of stars which may have existed in the early history of the Universe, characterized by being extremely massive and hot and having an extremely low metallicity.
What part of speech is Population III?
Population III is a proper noun.

Words near Population III in the dictionary

  1. population density
  2. population dynamics
  3. population genetics
  4. Population I
  5. Population II
  6. Population III
  7. population inversion
  8. population inversions
  9. population mean
  10. population means
  11. population pyramid

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: Population III (page history and authors); population III (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Cite this entry: “Population III.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/population_iii. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.