Ancient Star Found, Estimated at 13.2 Billion Years Old

raguirre writes "An article on Physorg.org reports that a newly found star may be as old as the universe itself. Recent studies have concluded that the Big Bang occurred somewhere in the neighborhood of 13.7 Billion years ago. The star, a heavy-elements laden fossil labeled HE 1523-0901 on charts was probably born right around the same time; approximately 13.2 Billion years ago. 'Today, astronomer Anna Frebel of the the University of Texas at Austin McDonald Observatory and her colleagues have deduced the star's age based on the amounts of radioactive elements it contains compared to certain other "anchor" elements, specifically europium, osmium and iridium.'"

Comments

Re:the creationists will not like this

[brit74]

I've seen a lot of mental gymnastics going on with creationists. They might claim that things had the 'appearance of age' when they were created. For example (supposedly), Adam and Eve were created as full-grown human beings without childhoods. They use this same sort of argument with stars (although, it doesn't stand up as well since God would've had a reasonable motive for creating full-grown humans, the reason for creating other things with the appearance of age is not at all clear - unless God were trying to fool us). One of the *new* claims a few creationists have been making is that somehow relativity allows the rest of the universe to actually be 14 billion years old even though the universe was created 6,000 years ago. They claim that something like time-dilation allowed a single-day passed on earth while the rest of the universe aged 14 billion years. The moral of the story? If you have an immutable belief in something + an all powerful God that can do whatever He wants, then all other evidence can be bended or ignored in service of that single immutable belief. Want to believe that God created the universe 10 seconds ago? No problem: God created you with memories of events that never occurred 'earlier' in your life, old newspapers with realistic-sounding events, light from the stars and the Sun were created partway in transit to the earth, etc etc. God can do that 'cuz He's all-powerful, don't ya know?

Re:the creationists will not like this

[rbarreira]

Was that before or after punishing us for doing something which was his fault? Him being omnipotent and all, should have known what we were up to when he created us...

Re:the creationists will not like this

[wanerious]

You raise an excellent point. Fortunately, we astronomers have also thought of this. And the geologists before us.

We have very good computer models of stellar evolution that compute yields of basically all the elements in the periodic table from core-collapse supernovae, which is the type of explosion that would generate all the elements above iron. These have been checked against observed abundances and agree very well. In addition, we have another independent check in that we can compare the ages derived through radiometric means to those derived from globular cluster ages. These also agree well. And, to further make the case, it was noted in the article that about 6 different species of radioactive isotopes were observed, so it would be very unusual for *all 6* isotopes to have an anomalous abundance in just the right way as to make the ages all agree. I've worked with a number of people in this sub-field; for what it's worth, they really seem to know what they're doing.

I don't support modding religious people down merely because they disbelieve something, though I must say that, as a fellow Christian, it's distressing to see lots of non-specialists assume an air of superiority and bash a scientific field that they (in some cases even admit) they know basically nothing about. It's often charitable to assume that these scientists are, in most cases, very smart people who spend their whole professional lives engaged in the study of these phenomena. It is *highly* unlikely that any joe off the street is going to raise any intellectually serious issues that hadn't been thought of already. Scientists have the right authority to speak on behalf of their science. If you don't want to believe it, for whatever reason, that's up to you, though you might do well to *try* to understand why they say the things they do. It's fascinating stuff.