A great cosmology faq, answering this and a lot of other questions: http://www.astro.ucla.edu/~wright/cosmology_faq.html
How Can a Star Be Older Than the Universe?
31–40 of 231 posts
Re: How Can a Star Be Older Than the Universe?
#32Short answer: it's only older than the universe if you ignore the error bars of the estimate.
And it's only older than the universe if you assume the Big Bang was the beginning of the universe, which there's really no evidence to suggest. Pretty much everything else in the universe all seems to suggest that it all originated from a similar point in time and space and that it rapidly expanded outward. Okay. But what was going on in this particular space back then is completely unknown, so... could there have b…
Quark Gluon Plasma (observed at the RHIC), at really early in the universe there was too much temperature and pressure to have stars or even atoms. At least that's my understanding.
Re: How Can a Star Be Older Than the Universe?
#33> It's composition meant the star must have come into being before iron became commonplace. Hypothesis 1: the star formed in a way that did not involve or produce a lot of iron. Hypothesis 2: the star is older than the universe itself. Clearly , hypothesis 2 is the more likely.
It's a hard sell to someone who has cursory interest on the subject had the title been your first hypothesis. Still, not great.
Re: How Can a Star Be Older Than the Universe?
#34> It's composition meant the star must have come into being before iron became commonplace. Hypothesis 1: the star formed in a way that did not involve or produce a lot of iron. Hypothesis 2: the star is older than the universe itself. Clearly , hypothesis 2 is the more likely.
Hypothesis 3: Due to inherently incomplete information, our understanding of the age of the universe is not yet perfectly correct, and the universe may be older than current models and theory.
Strap yourselves in folks, maybe The Big Bang is but one event woven amid a deeper tapestry of events, significant only in its capacity to occlude deeper periods of time.
It should surprise no one that we might be wrong about some centralized, focal aspect of the universe, given how wrong we've been before, about things we assumed to be the center or origin, previously.
Re: How Can a Star Be Older Than the Universe?
#35Earlier quoted context omitted.
(That) Space was also created by the big bang.
What's the evidence of that? I'm not arguing, but between cosmic background radiation, doppler shift of stars and the relationship between speed / distance, all the evidence of the big bang I've heard doesn't suggest anything about space itself.
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Re: How Can a Star Be Older Than the Universe?
#36We've been here before, with stars older than the age of the universe. Last time, we thought that there was only one kind of Cepheid variable. This lead to underestimating the age of the universe. Later, astronomers realized the nearby Cepheid variables (used for calibrating the period/luminosity relationship) differed systematically from the bright Cepheid variables that we could see in distance galaxies.
Understanding the difference between Type I and Type II Cepheid variables lead to a greater estimate for the age of the universe, resolving the difficulty. So I expect some interesting astronomy to come out of tracking down the cause of this discrepancy.
Re: How Can a Star Be Older Than the Universe?
#37Earlier quoted context omitted.
And it's only older than the universe if you assume the Big Bang was the beginning of the universe, which there's really no evidence to suggest. Pretty much everything else in the universe all seems to suggest that it all originated from a similar point in time and space and that it rapidly expanded outward. Okay. But what was going on in this particular space back then is completely unknown, so... could there have b…
Quark Gluon Plasma (observed at the RHIC), at really early in the universe there was too much temperature and pressure to have stars or even atoms. At least that's my understanding.
Yes but Quark Gluon Plasma existed immediately following the Big Bang. We arrive at the Big Bang by reverse engineering lots of evidence we see in the universe. What evidence is there that nothing else currently inside the bubble of the observable universe could possibly have been there, very far away from the Big Bang, at the time of the Big Bang?
I don't see why I'm being down-voted because as of yet no one has answered that question. I'm not saying the Big Bang didn't happen. I'm saying we have no observations that give us any confidence we'll never encounter something that wasn't part of the Big Bang. This star actually pre-dating the Big Bang is extremely unlikely, I agree. The simpler explanation is the uncertainty in it's age estimation. But equating "the observable universe" with "stuff that originated in the Big Bang" is an assumption we simply don't have much reasoning for, other than we haven't seen much other stuff. But then... we also don't see many stars this old.
Re: How Can a Star Be Older Than the Universe?
#38Earlier quoted context omitted.
(That) Space was also created by the big bang.
What's the evidence of that? I'm not arguing, but between cosmic background radiation, doppler shift of stars and the relationship between speed / distance, all the evidence of the big bang I've heard doesn't suggest anything about space itself.
The universe is expanding. This started at some point, and I suppose the theory says that it started at the point where there was no space.
Re: How Can a Star Be Older Than the Universe?
#39Here we go again... "scientists would look at the ripples in the fabric of space and time". Am I the only one who finds this expression very confusing? What fabric? There is no fabric. Space and time are coordinates. They do not exist physically at all. There cannot be a fabric of space and time.
Re: How Can a Star Be Older Than the Universe?
#40This 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 o…
> 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.
Later (in section "Taking a closer look at the age of the universe"), they tell that your theory is also being looked into.