How Can a Star Be Older Than the Universe?
1–10 of 231 posts
Re: How Can a Star Be Older Than the Universe?
#2Tl; dr:
They don't know either
Re: How Can a Star Be Older Than the Universe?
#3A question - how common are such old stars? Because it is right in our backyard. 190 light years away are nothing. And if those stars are rare - that makes our neighborhood unusual - we have life and some of the oldest object in the universe in almost the same spot.
Re: How Can a Star Be Older Than the Universe?
#4Why can't the star be older because of relativity? I imagine that, particularly in the early universe while everything was nearer to everything else, relative background gravity was higher (and thus relative time) is different than now. Would the star not age at a different rate if it's a remnant from violent beginnings of the universe?
Re: How Can a Star Be Older Than the Universe?
#5Why can't the star be older because of relativity? I imagine that, particularly in the early universe while everything was nearer to everything else, relative background gravity was higher (and thus relative time) is different than now. Would the star not age at a different rate if it's a remnant from violent beginnings of the universe?
I think, if I understand your question correctly, that a star couldn't age more, only less, from our perspective.
EDIT: I could be wrong though, and additionally I believe the star being referenced by the article is actually in a similar reference frame so relativity likely isn't the answer anyways.
Re: How Can a Star Be Older Than the Universe?
#6A question - how common are such old stars? Because it is right in our backyard. 190 light years away are nothing. And if those stars are rare - that makes our neighborhood unusual - we have life and some of the oldest object in the universe in almost the same spot.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stellar_population#Population_...
"Thus far, they have uncovered and studied in detail about ten ultra metal poor (UMP) stars"
Re: How Can a Star Be Older Than the Universe?
#7wow what an interesting article. Finding not one, but multiple stars that are much older than the predicted age of the universe means something is likely very wrong with one of our theories: dark energy, star aging, or using the cosmic background as a measure of the universe's age.
Re: How Can a Star Be Older Than the Universe?
#8Jesus, what an aggresive website: https://i.imgur.com/1aCo9DV.png.
Re: How Can a Star Be Older Than the Universe?
#9A question - how common are such old stars? Because it is right in our backyard. 190 light years away are nothing. And if those stars are rare - that makes our neighborhood unusual - we have life and some of the oldest object in the universe in almost the same spot.
190 light years is in our backyard compared to the size of the universe, but I was curious about how many stars are that close to us. It turns out that we have around 100k stars within 190 light years.
0.120 stars/parsec^3 * 4/3 * pi (190 ly * parsec/3.26ly)^3
Re: How Can a Star Be Older Than the Universe?
#10This remind me of a similar story with the age of the earth and the solar system. Scientists using new methods were starting to discover that Earth was far, far older than originally predicted...so old, that it seemed to predate our sun. It turns out it our estimates of the solar system's age were wrong, but it took some time to figure out why.
I imagine something similar is going on here. The article mentions that once they got an age older than the universe, they started looking at how to make the star younger...finally by acknowledging the margin of error in estimates. That sounds like bad science to me.