Strange 'Methuselah' Star Looks Older Than the Universe (2024)

FAQs

Strange 'Methuselah' Star Looks Older Than the Universe? ›

The Universe is precisely dated at 13.8 billion years old, but astronomers claim the Methuselah star is 14.5 billion years old.

The uncertainty for the estimate of the age of the Methuselah Star is ±0.8 billion years, meaning the actual age of the star is somewhere between 13.65 and 15.25 billion years. (More technically, there is a 70% chance that the actual age of the star is within that range, and a 30% chance that it is outside of it.

The Methuselah Star, HD 140283, was first noticed for rapidly approaching Earth, but now its fame comes from its extreme age. The star HD 140283 has been called the "Methuselah star" for its extreme age. At an estimated over 14 billion years old, it's the oldest star we know, at least within our galaxy.

The curious star is located some 190 light-years away from Earth in the constellation Libra and it rapidly journeys across the sky at 800,000 mph (1.3 million kilometers per hour). Fast facts: – Methuselah covers the width of the moon in the night sky every 1,500 years.

We do not know the exact age of the universe, but we believe that it is around 13 billion years - give or take a few billion. Astronomers estimate the age of the universe in two ways: (a) by looking for the oldest stars; and (b) by measuring the rate of expansion of the universe and extrapolating back to the Big Bang.

And yet, we know how stars work, and astronomers have estimated the age of the Methuselah star, found right here in the Milky Way, to be 14.5 billion years old: significantly older than the cosmos itself. Clearly, you can't have a star within the Universe that's older than the Universe itself.

Concerning the age of the Earth, the Bible's genealogical records combined with the Genesis 1 account of creation are used to estimate an age for the Earth and universe of about 6000 years, with a bit of uncertainty on the completeness of the genealogical records, allowing for a few thousand years more.

But what if the universe was actually even older than scientists believed? Well, it turns out that it might be much older. A new study by scientists at the University of Ottawa suggests that the universe is actually twice as old as we previously thought, at around 26.7 billion years old.

One such datum is the existence of a star with an age reported to be older than the cosmos itself. This star is called the Methuselah star, named after the biblical patriarch.

How old is the oldest known planet? Almost as old as the universe, it turns out. At 12.7 billion years old, planet Psr B1620-26 B is almost three times the age of Earth, which formed some 4.5 billion years ago.

What existed before the universe? ›

The initial singularity is a singularity predicted by some models of the Big Bang theory to have existed before the Big Bang. The instant immediately following the initial singularity is part of the Planck epoch, the earliest period of time in the history of our universe.

In about 100 trillion years, the last light will go out. The bad news is that the universe is going to die a slow, aching, miserable death.

Before 1999, astronomers had estimated that the age of the universe was between 7 and 20 billion years. But with advances in technology and the development of new techniques we now know the age of the universe is 13.7 billion years, with an uncertainty of only 200 million years. How did this come to be?

But with advances in technology and the development of new techniques we now know the age of the universe is 13.7 billion years, with an uncertainty of only 200 million years.

It's long been believed that the Universe is 13.8 billion years old. But there was a puzzle for many scientists, because some early stars seemed too well formed to fit that timeline.

Relative Dating Pushed Earth's Age into Billions

Layers can be rearranged, bent, or contain inconsistencies. However, stratigraphy yields no exact age for those layers or events. Relative dating did not give scientists the exact number they were looking for.

Astronomy is the oldest of the natural sciences, dating back to antiquity, with its origins in the religious, mythological, cosmological, calendrical, and astrological beliefs and practices of prehistory: vestiges of these are still found in astrology, a discipline long interwoven with public and governmental astronomy ...