2023-08-10 13:23:00
The oldest known star is HD 140283, or Star of Methuselah, estimated to be over 14 billion years old. However, scientists point out that the universe would only be 13.8 billion years old, how would that be possible? Or are just the accounts wrong?
HD 140283 is located in the Milky Way just 190 light-years away from Earth, so close that it can be seen using simple telescopes. His nickname Methuselah is in reference to the biblical character Noah’s ancestor, who would have been the oldest man, living 969 years.
The ages of stars are usually estimated from their brightness or their composition, with the oldest being richest in helium and hydrogen. To find out how long ago Methuselah’s star formed, in 2013 researchers used data collected by the Hubble Space Telescope and estimated that it is around 14.6 billion years old, and could be more or less 800 million years old.
The date of when the Big Bang happened was stipulated from the rate of expansion of the universe, predicted by Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity, at 13.79 billion years. But now, those calculations have been called into question due to evidence that points to the existence of stars older than that, or so close that it’s impossible for them to have had enough time to form.
Image: Disclosure/NASA
Pointing out that the Big Bang never happened because of this would be a revolution for science and change everything we know about the cosmos today. Less radical but still dramatic hypotheses suggest that the universe emerged 26.7 billion years ago. If that were the case, we would have already found at least one star that is about 20 billion years old.
The most modest hypothesis is that it would have appeared about 15 billion years ago, but for that some of our calculations were wrong about the expansion of the universe.
Read more:
Miscalculation of the age of the oldest star
Although the calculations performed to stipulate the age of stars are reliable, they are still susceptible to errors. In addition to 14.6 billion years, other researchers have produced ages of 13.7 billion, 12.2 billion, and 12.0 billion for HD 140283. The last two estimates have enough leeway for the Universe to be 13.79 billion years old. , and even the former can be explained by the margin of error.
If any of these values were confirmed, the age of the universe would be safe, but even if the opposite were true, it is more plausible that it is just a little older than twice its currently estimated age.
Have you watched the new videos on YouTube of the Digital Look? Subscribe to the channel!
#oldest #star #older #Universe