Slashdot Mirror
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.'"
Of course, according to some pastors, that star is only a few thousand years old. It barely predates The Flood.
--saint
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.
Since when was "right around the same time" the same thing as "500 million years later" ?
given an object like this, with a time reference to the big bang, the knowledge of the rate of expansion of the universe etc.. wonder if the origin of the big bang could be pinpointed.
"a newly found start may be as old as the universe itself"
Well, that's why they call it a 'start' isn't it?
My turnips listen for the soft cry of your love
The universe is infinite. Once science advances its observing capacity then the age of the universe will be cranked up another notch. Unfortunately an open, infinite universe completely trounces their beloved "big bang" theory which has Hollywood scrawled all over it.
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.
I thought early stars had very few heavy elements because there had yet to be multiple generations of stars to produce such. Thus, where did the heavy elements come from?
Table-ized A.I.
older than clint eastwood or james bronson? that are stars!
?
I only had time to skim TFA, but it says this ancient star contains heavy elements (Heavier than iron). Since the fusion reaction that produces iron consumes energy, the heavy elements must have come from a different star.
0.5 billion years seems quite quick for a few stars to go super nova, then condense into another star with the required heavy elements in.
I just talked to some scholars on the topic of Christian mythology. They are specialists in the field. They tell me that this particular star is the star marking the birth of the fictional figure called "Jesus Christ".
Isn't everything as old as the universe; it just all shifted into different forms? (Like planet Earth)
== Jez ==
Do you miss Firefox? Try Pale Moon.
With all these stars turning up that are considerably older then, what is it, 6000 years, they'll probably start foaming at the mouth. I wish I knew one nowadays so I could show them this article and watch the mental gymnastics as they sought to refute it.
ah yes, the funs.
HE 1523-0901 also wanted to know if it was elegible for social security, and when the first cheque is arriving. It was also heard complaining about how expensive it's perscription medication is, as it has a heavy-elements imbalance.
Took 500 million years. So we should be able to work out how long God's days are!!!!
Deleted
Cher? Is that you?
Always back up, never back down. ---- Think you're cool 'cos your uid is prime? Take mine, modulo the one digit integers
That star was what we looked like 26.4 billion years ago. Not we as in you and I, but we as in an area--and not just volummetric, but similar in mass and energy as well--roughly the same size as the observed star. The pictures that we take with the Hubble, ESO's VLT, and other deep space scanning arrays only see the radiation which has been reflected. They don't see the radiation which has kept going. We're not observing radiation which is coming from that star--we're seeing radiation which came from here, went to there, and is now reflecting back off of some deep space mirror--maybe a reflective atmosphere of some distant planet.
If I want to take that to the extreme one could hypothesize that we really are at the center of the universe, the Big Bang did start right here, and the light (or energy) which we are calling "HE 1523" started out here 26.4 billion years ago and now we're recording (photographing) the light which has reflected back off of something on a distant side of the universe.
Taking that to a further extreme one could say that every picture--each and every single one--or recording made of radiation observed from outer space is a mere reflection of radiation which originated here. That the stars and galaxies look different is only because the pictures are taken at different angles.
Imagine standing on the inside of an irregularly shaped egg with a perfectly reflective inner surface and looking around you. Conceptually the universe is somewhat similar to the spacecraft that young Superman travelled in as portrayed in the first Superman movie--except the boundaries are constantly shifting and changing according to God's whim.
The only thing left is to tie it in with string theory and envision a matrix of these irregularly shaped eggs, each infinitely enormous, each with its own 27.4 billion year old big bang.
the NPG electrode was replaced with carbon blac
Did someone dig up Bob Hope again?
If you could reason with religious people, there would be no religious people
Nibblonians were .5 billon plus 17 years old by that time.
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"
Doesn't the amount of radiaton a star puts out vary from time to time depending on the stage of the star's life?
If so I don't know if you can accurately predict the age just by radiation. What if something outside stimulated the amount of radiation the star is putting off? This could probobly throw it off a couple hundred million years.
Yeah, the star of Boston Legal is 13.2 billion years old!
Would the Guardians please send someone over to sort out this business with Sinestro ^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H George Bush?
That argument usually sets a creationist's hair on fire.
....The Star or the Universe..
Ha....ha....
A morning without coffee is like something without something else.
I had thought that the life cycle of stars was pretty much figured out, including how long they last.
But TFA talks as if it is a unusual and surprising that it is so old.
So what gives?
Do they need to completely rethink their models or were they just really making generalizations in the first place?
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
I could also ride my bicycle the 25mi. that I normally drive my car every day, but I don't. If you can make a human, why make a monkey... and then turn it into a human? Your argument isn't being made out of sincere curiosity and reasoning, but rather to belittle and frustrate others who believe differently than you.
For the Steady State, Alfven, or colliding brane cosmologies to be falsifiable, it must be (in principle) possible to radioactively date a star, or meteorite, or speck of interstellar dust as, say, 10^10 (ten billion) years old. Or a trillion.
But what would it mean to radioactively date an object as having negative age?
I ask both as a former Astronomy professor, and as a science fiction author...
-- Jonathan Vos Post
Check out Gerald Schroeder's "Science of God". He considers the creation account in the book of Genesis as a view from the beginning looking forward, whereas modern scientists are looking from our point in time backward. Using some mathematics and relativity, he demonstrates that a handful of thousand years from "Day 1" equate to the 13 billion years to May 12, 2007. I heard his presentation years ago, else I'd explain it better. Bottom line is that the whole time frame disagreement is simply a matter of relative position on the time line.
There is a little confusion about how the elements are created, and where HE1523 got all it's metals from...so here is a quick primer on the way things work.
The big bang forms hydrogen, dueterium, some helium, and a tiny amount of lithium. In fact, the theory of what should be formed (called Big Bang Nucleosynthesis), and what is observed, agree incredibly well.
Most stars just burn hydrogen into helium, fusing the two hydrogen atoms. More massive stars burn hotter, and so they can ignite helium burning, forming carbon, nitrogen, oxygen etc. The hotter the star gets, the heavier things can be fused, all the way up to iron. All of these processes *release* energy, if you can get it hot enough to start the reaction.
After iron, to make heavier elements you have to *put in* energy, so the way elements are formed is different. Instead of fusing two things together, you now just add a single neutron to the nucleus. This is a very different process (called neutron capture)...and can happen veeeery slowly (in stars) or very rapidly (in supernova explosions).
So, uranium and thorium are both elements which are made in the rapid process (r-process) -- they are only made in supernova explosions...because in a supernova, the neutron density is very high, so catching one is more likely.
Anyway...the point of all this is that, by observing uranium, we KNOW there had to have been at least one dying star going supernova, which made the uranium. Then that gas collapsed again later, to make anna's star.
So far, no-one has yet managed to find a first-generation star, but it's a big area of research at the moment, and is one of the things anna is trying hard to find. By looking at these very old stars, we get a good picture of how a supernova works, because we see the product of ONLY ONE of them. With young stars, there might have been hundreds, all polluting the gas at different times...and disentangling that is really tough.
As for the age of the universe, WMAP told us that very precisely -- 13.7Gyr (with an error of only ~0.1Gyr). The age we derived from HE1523 is much less precise...but nucleocosmochronometry (stellar age dating), is an incredibly tough thing to do, but it does offer independant confirmationg of the WMAP result.
If you can make a human, why make a monkey... and then turn it into a human?
Why not? What's the point of making man anyway? Do you know that, so that you can comment on the method God may or may not have chosen to create man?
And saying evolution is anti-religious is also extremely presumptive. Anyone who says that is presuming to tell God Himself that He is not allowed to use evolution to create man in His own image. Do you really think God is limited by the capabilities and beliefs of your mind?
I don't presume to be able to say God did or didn't do anything, or even would or wouldn't do anything. I just follow the only evidence I can see - evidence that isn't based on nothing more than something somebody else told me.
I can go out an verify how old a star is myself, were I wont to do so. I can go see actual fossils of myriads of extinct species. I can actually touch rocks that all the evidence we can gather tells us are billions of years old.
You can do all that, too.
And we can all actually see evolution in action - witness the documented changes in the different breeds of dogs over the past several thousand years. I'd have to say chihuahuas and Saint Bernard's are pretty close to becoming separate species...
An ancient sun.
An alien with a secret.
An astronomer with a past.
A galaxy thorn asunder.
An astronaut on the edge.
A hidden moon.
A mythical planet.
An ancient.. mythical.. secret.. planet sun guy.
And a flaming chicken.
In 2009, none of these things, happen in ATHF 2.
Except the flaming chicken.
I wish I had mod points...
You've wasted something like 248 words, and the creationist would simply reply with one: "Faith". Why do you people even address those doofuses? Live your life. If their god cared about any of us he'd make more than one appearance every two thousand years. You know, maybe end disease, or enforce an end to self-serving corruption in all national governments. Perhaps something more meaningful than supplying extra wine at weddings, something more enriching than drowning children in tsunamis.
Why not? Either God's all powerful and making a human from a monkey is exactly as easy as making a human from scratch, or God's not all powerful. Besides, assuming the all-powerful-but-lazy God of your argument, wouldn't creating the universe and just letting life sorta happen be easier than doing it all by hand?
Play Command HQ online
I think this one is Zsa-Zsa. :)
I think you pushing the idee of Darwin ist plain ignorance of history. The last millions (10 millions even 100 millions) of years people have been walking the earth, there are enough relicts proving that. We never came from the apes. But those religion fanatics who think we only like 10.000 years old, are just as ignorant as those who believe in Darwins theorie. It's called a theorie, why? because it's not a fact. Even from ape to man a lot of steps are missing.
Modern Science is very ignorant of its surroundings, everything it can't see or understand it calls superstition. And what has it brought us? You can compare it with an evil/destructive religion. A lot of things are invented that only destroy our environments, making it more trouble for us to live and breath (more sicknesses, environment polution, more allergies, etc. Bigger Wars). It takes people's hope for a better world (after life) away from us. It takes the hope away, that live isn't useless. It takes the morality away from people. Without believing in Gods people will be restricted at doing bad things anymore. Just look at young people, it's getting worse every generation.
Inquiring minds want to know...
...somebody edit Conservapedia!
Nah, that is a false assumption. :)
God can do anything without the need of motive.
Of course HE may have motive if HE wants some
It is soo much easier to debate on the creationist side.
Patents Drive Free Software as Hurricanes Drive Construction Industry
It's appalling how many people think Darwin's theory implies we (humans) evolved from apes. The actual theory is rather that humans and apes share a common ancestor, and so if you go back far enough, we were once a single species. Owing to variation within that species, however, it gradually split in two, by way of natural and sexual selection, with one branch evolving into apes whilst the other evolved into humans (and other, now extinct, branches).
It's appalling how many people think Darwin's theory implies we (humans) evolved from apes.
What is your problem with humans evolving from apes?
Of course we did not evolve from modern apes but from creatures who we, if we met them today, would probably call apes. And we share common ancestors with every known creature.
Btw. zoologically speaking we are apes!
What is your problem with humans evolving from apes?
The same problem I would have if someone described my brother as my ancestor: it's simply wrong. My brother and I share the same parents, but he's not my ancestor, and nor am I his ancestor.
Of course we did not evolve from modern apes but from creatures who we, if we met them today, would probably call apes.
You're completely missing the point. The term "ape", in normal usage, refers to animals that live now: chimpanzees, gorillas and so on. If you say, "we evolved from apes", you're implying we evolved from chimpanzees, gorillas, et al., which is absolutely not what evolution implies.
We did not evolve from other animals living now. Amongst other thing, this means we should not expect to find a "missing link" that is halfway between us and any particular species of ape. Why not? Because chimpanzees, gorillas, et al. have been evolving too. Our most recent common ancestor was thus not some sort of amalgam of modern humans and chimpanzees (or gorillas, etc.).
I can't count the number of times I've read creationist comments claiming the lack of "half-man/half-gorilla" (or "half-man/half-chimpanzee", etc.) fossils disproves evolution, and this is a direct result of misinterpreting evolutionary theory as implying that currently living species evolved from other currently living species.
And we share common ancestors with every known creature.
Precisely. Would you therefore claim we evolved from every known creature? Such a claim is patently absurd.
Btw. zoologically speaking we are apes!
Zoologically speaking we're all primates, mammals and animals too. I fail to see how that is in the least bit relevant.
At the end of the day, saying "we evolved from apes" spreads the misleading idea that evolution means some sort of magical transformation from one currently existing species to another currently existing species. When presented this way, it's no wonder that seemingly intelligent people can reject the idea. When presented in terms of what the theory actually means, it is far more intuitive, and less likely to be rejected by intelligent people.
It might be a bit more frightening to think of it as apes evolved from human ancestors but what I said is absolutely valid.
"IN the beginning there was light..." light requires time no time no light; between now and then is relative. Think about the balloon example, if we're one of the dots and a dimension beyond time like "God" is blowing up the balloons how can you think of star dating or God dating in such lunacy as years and seconds.
IN the beginning there was light..." light requires time no time no light; between now and then is relative. Think about the balloon example, if we're one of the dots and a dimension beyond time like "God" is blowing up the balloons how can you think of star dating or God dating in such lunacy as years and seconds.
If the Big Bang occurred some 13.7 billion years ago, and the age of the solar system is only 4.7 bn years, then what happened in the interim?
Or another way of putting it, what's the age of our galaxy, and of the local cluster, and of the local cluster of clusters, etc etc, and can we deduce anything at all about the period 13.7 bn to 4.7 bn years before now?
From the article, "Surprisingly, it is very hard to pin down the age of a star." Well, duh, I could have told you that. Who ever heard of a star revealing their age. It may just be a coincidence, but I believe 13.2 billion years is the age of Joan Collins.
Letter To Iran
Clearly, it has to be named Zamora.
>It's appalling how many people think Darwin's theory implies we (humans) evolved from apes.
Humans didn't evolve from apes. Humans *are* apes.
-- Give me ambiguity or give me something else!
[100% ISO 646 Compliant]
SVM, ERGO MONSTRO.
What happens if the next ancient Star is found to have been born 14.5 Billion years ago? Will scientists heads start popping?
-+-=-+-=-+-=-+-=-+-=-+ *** http://www.mountainfort.com *** +-=-+-=-+-=-+-=-+-=-+-
What process started the actual "burning" process of stars? What provides that initial spark?
The inital "spark" is provided by gravity. When a star forms, it is from a slowly collapsing gas cloud. As the gas contracts under gravity, it heats up, eventually reaching a temperature for fusion to begin. The temperature is important, because the hydrogen nuclei (i.e. protons) normally repel each other...thus they need a fair bit of energy to overcome the repulsion, and get close enough to "stick"...i.e. fusion.
This is very similar to the ideal gas law, PV = nkT....i.e. as the pressure goes up, there must be a corresponding increase in temperature. A cool experiment to illustate this is to put your finger over the pointy end of a fat syringe, and then press really hard. The increased pressure will heat the gas. This is also way scuba tanks need to be filled in a bath of water...compressing the gas to put into the tank creates a fair amount of heat.
I was working on a Larry King joke but yours is better.
> My brother and I share the same parents, but he's not my ancestor, and nor am I his ancestor. Bad analogy. The word ape is defined to include humans and all other modern apes as well as ancestral organisms that are common ancestors to humans and modern apes. The word 'brother' isn't defined like that. That's it. There is no more discussion to have. If you don't like this fact then you're simply using the word 'ape' unconventionally meaning you're not speaking the same language as the rest of us.
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
And in other news, another element was discovered to be emanating from this star.
It has been named bloddyoldium.
Owing to variation within that species, however, it gradually split in two, by way of natural and sexual selection, with one branch evolving into apes whilst the other evolved into humans (and other, now extinct, branches).
Human's are a sub-branch of the ape tree, not a separate branch.
In short: it would be bad mmm-kay?
r y/
What it would prove is that the big bang was not a singular event and that material from other big bangs has floated into our region. This sort of idea has been put forward by various string theorists and often in connection with p-branes.
Check out http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brane_cosmology/ and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyclic_Universe_Theo
"Laugh while you can a-monkey boy!" - Dr Emilio Lizardo
I'm afraid not. If you look in an English dictionary, you'll find that the standard definition of "ape" does not include humans or the common ancestors of humans and apes.
I just looked in three of the most popular dictionaries (two UK and one US), and all of them define "ape" in the way I used it, not in the way you claim it's used. Perhaps you're confusing normal usage with scientific terminology, which puts humans and apes in the same family. Even then, however, I'd say your usage is fairly dubious.
It was a nice try, but alas, you're simply wrong. Cheers.
In short: it would be bad mmm-kay?
Not really. If a star that appears to be significantly older than the universe is discovered, well that's happened before. There have been times when we thought that the universe was one age and then got back results from measuring the age of certain star and globular clusters that were older than what we thought was the age of the universe. When something like this usually means that either method of measuring the age of the or the method of measuring the age of the universe is wrong. Most astronomers today seem pretty confident in the current method of measuring the age of the universe so if a too ancient star is found they are more likely to question their method of estimating the age of the star.
What it would prove is that the big bang was not a singular event and that material from other big bangs has floated into our region. This sort of idea has been put forward by various string theorists and often in connection with p-branes.
I was under the impression that brane theories suggest that the only way different branes could interact was through gravity. You wouldn't get actual matter floating in from one brane to another. In any case material from other big bangs would likely have been created under a different set of physical laws and would be like nothing else in "our" universe.
Does this
Hello. We're talking science here. Hadn't you noticed? (And ancestral apes fit the definition in every dictionary I've looked in.) I bet you're one of those people who complains about the chemist's use of the word organic because it doesn't fit in with common usage down the supermarket. Idiot.
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
Speaking of radiant...
http://www.as.utexas.edu/~anna/
I'd like to probe her elements!