At some point, a flawed paradigm will start cranking out absurd
results. In this instance, our paradigm for measuring age in the
universe is telling us that a nearby star that is still in the
hydrogen burn stage is older than the universe. This is nonsense of
course.
What it tells us is that our models for stellar evolution are
incomplete at least and our assumptions on age and distance are
deeply flawed as we have long since thought.
I think about the universe using two conjectures. It is steady state
in appearance and relative velocity is negligible. The red shift
varies directly as to transit time and thus with the age of the
universe and its content then. More simply the photon arrives from
the past in which the content of the universe was smaller. This
induces our red shift.
In fact that nearby star is going to turn out to be quite young and
our real assumption is just wrong and must be revisited.
Oldest star in the
universe is right in our stellar neighborhood
By Scott
Sutherland
Nothing is older than
the universe, right? Well, don't be so sure about that.
Astronomers are reporting that a nearby star could older
than The Big Bang by almost a billion years!
For nearly 100 years,
astronomers have been studying a bright subgiant star named
HD 140283 and struggling to pin down the age of it.
HD 140283 is
remarkable for the fact that it is almost entirely composed of
hydrogen and helium. That may seem like a strange thing for a star to
be remarkable for, but whereas most other stars are mainly
hydrogen and helium, they also contain heavier elements, such
as oxygen, carbon, neon and iron, equal to at least a few per
cent of their mass. These heavier elements were all created in
thecores of dying stars, and spread out in the universe when
those dying stars exploded. Thus, this means that HD 140283 is
almost certainly one of the first stars that appeared in the
universe, before these heavier elements were generated.
The astronomers were
able to figure out its age by determining its exact distance from us
(a mere 190 light years) and taking very precise measurements of its
brightness. Since the star is now in the process of exhausting
the hydrogen at its core and switching to burning helium — a
process which will cause it to dim in a very specific way — the
exact distance, brightness and how much that brightness dims reveals
the star's age.
The result they got
was baffling, as their calculations showed that the star is 13.9
billion years old! For reference, our best estimate for the age of
the universe is 13.7 billion years!
Now, there's a
700-million-year margin of error in their calculations,
which may seem really big, but these are huge numbers
we're dealing with, so the error is still small (about 5%) compared
to the result. That means that HD 140283 is somewhere between 13.2
billion years old (roughly the age of our galaxy) and 14.6 billion
years old (nearly one billion years older than the
universe).
Personally, I'm
guessing that the true age of this star is going to be somewhere
towards the younger end of that range. However, if HD 140283 truly is
as old as they're saying, does it rewrite what we know about the
age of the universe, or perhaps what we know about stellar
evolution?
Even if HD
140283 doesn't pre-date The Big Bang, and thus rewrite our
understanding of how the universe formed, its extreme age could still
lead to some incredible discoveries.
Was it a lonely
wanderer in the universe, until it got caught up in our galaxy's
gravitational influence and settled into our stellar neighborhood?
Perhaps it was a relatively small companion to the star that
collapsed to create the supermassive black hole at the
centre of our galaxy. Has it been circling around the galactic disk
for all these billions of years, as the other stars in the Milky Way
formed around it?
We may never know the
answers to questions like these, but this star is simply another
example of the incredible wonders contained in our universe.
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