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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" ?
"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 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.
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.
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.
Took 500 million years. So we should be able to work out how long God's days are!!!!
Deleted
Doubtful. All objects in the universe are moving away from each other. We know this because when we look up into the sky, everything is red shifted... which would seem to indicate that Earth is the center of the universe, but it is not.
How is that possible? You can run a universal expansion experiment at home with a black magic marker and a balloon. First, blow up the balloon and draw a group of dots on it so that you can observe all the dots at once (don't draw dots on opposite sides of the balloon). Deflate the balloon. Now, choose a dot on the balloon, and watch it while you inflate the balloon. You will notice the dot remains stationary while all of the other dots move away from it. Deflate the balloon, choose another dot, and repeat the observation. You will see that this completely different spot also appears to remain stationary while all other dots move away from it. This is similar to what is happening with the expansion of the universe... and I would hazard a guess that such a mechanic makes pinpointing the origin nigh impossible.
Simple. God created our "world" 6000 years ago, but God, in His infinite wisdom, has tried to support the human spirit to explore and discover by placing a star long away from us that it seems to be 13.2 billion years old.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
Did someone dig up Bob Hope again?
If you could reason with religious people, there would be no religious people
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?
Wow, you don't know anything, do you? God hasn't created the universe yet. He just wants us to think he did!
Stars do not, for certain, have a unique elemental composition. They have a characteristic fingerprint of radiation which we interpret to correspond with various elemental compositions. The fact is that we've only recorded sets of photons and then drawn conclusions, some of them are well-founded but they are still interpreted conclusions nevertheless, about what elements those photons most likely were emitted from.
Recognizing that astronomical observers are recording radiation leads back to my initial explanation: 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 That perfectly reflective inner surface is irregularly shaped--like crinkled up aluminum foil. Take a piece of crinkled aluminum foil, spread it somewhat flat, and then begin looking at it from different angles. The pattern of colors reflected back to you will be different every time you change the angle--yet it's still the same piece of aluminum foil.
the NPG electrode was replaced with carbon blac
That theory is called the tired light theory and has been thoroughly debunked. No scientist worth the name believes in it. I'm sorry to say it, but you're simply wrong on that one.
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...
The AACS key is NOT 0xF606EEFD628B1CA427BEA93A9CA9773F
A more likely scenario is that God had one hell (Hell?) of a bender the night before "The Beginning".
"Let there be light." Eergh! (buries His head under the covers for a few hundred million years.)
I performed your experiment and discovered the answer to the question of whether the universe will continue to expand indefinitely, or one day begin collapsing inward. I solemnly report the existence of a unimaginably horrible third alternative, one that even at this relatively minor scale caused the cat to jump three feet in the air.
how many pairs of boxer shorts should you own?
Dude, that's like, so deep man.
As typical as it is to suggest the acts of JC are hugely exaggerated, by modern standards they're pretty tame. All over the world, especially in some of the older surviving civilizations like Russia, China, India, etc. there are people who can show you much more impressive feats at a moment's natice, and they don't claim to have inherited any powers of God. There's just a lot about science we haven't charted yet, but that doesn't mean the practice of unscientific feats is impossible. As has been said, absence of evidence isn't evidence of absence. While I'm not suggesting JC performed the feats attributed to him, I am suggesting it wouldn't be otherworldly if somebody did. It's unscientific to insist upon impossibility, despite what most people seem to instinctively believe about science.
Sam ty sig.
Ahh crap... Not good with HTML What I ment to say was "I believe that is what is refered to as the Big Rip Theory" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Rip
I have repeated your experiment and regret to say that I was unable to reproduce your results. Since a cat could not be located for this experiment, no cat jumped in the air therefor the universe will not end in such a horrible manner therefor we can all resume believing that everything will be hunky dory. Please forget what you saw. Thank you.
SWM seeks new sig for a brief fling
Why? Because I suggest that someone prove a negative and you're going to tell me that "you can't prove a negative."
No, because you're just begging the question.
You're presupposing that there is some merit to the idea of God in the first place.
You're the one proposing one, you're the one who must prove it.
I have no need to disprove god any more than I need to disprove the tooth fairy.
That is the deep flaw in your argument. It's a fallacy from the start.
Personally, I do not believe in God, but I know that it is because I choose that belief. I am not some cold rationalist with mountains of evidence to prove my position. It's purely a matter of faith.
I do not believe in god, but I didn't "choose" that.
I, you, and every other person who ever lived was born an atheist.
I never chose to be otherwise.
There is a tremendous difference between blind faith and not choosing to buy into some idiotic belief system.
In fact, if you could give hard evidence that god exists, I would convert to christianity immediately. But I won't hold my breath.
Why would you convert to Christianity just because he proved god existed? Heck, just proving god exists creates more questions, the most obvious being which of the thousands or millions of proposed gods is it?
you raise an interesting conundrum, my friend. Is there a cat outside the universe, or is there not? If there is, then it dies of fright. Otherwise, it does not die at all. We might even say the cat is both dead and not dead, AT THE SAME TIME. One might even refer to this theory as a kind of "Uncertainty Principle". That name's not taken yet, is it?
how many pairs of boxer shorts should you own?
Well, it didn't sound so much like a rip as like a bang. One could even call it a "Big Bang" theory. I think I'll go put the theory on Wikipedia before someone else steals the name.
how many pairs of boxer shorts should you own?
If by "origin" you mean "point of origin", then we already have that answer. The big bang was not an explosion which occurred at one point in space, spewing matter and energy out everywhere. The big bang was a big explosion OF space, and spewed out a glob of space which began to expand, making points more distant from each other.
So you cannot ask "where" the big bang occurred, because if you take all the points in space as far as can be seen, all of those points in space were at one single point at the moment of the big bang. So the best answer to "where" is "everywhere".
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.
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.
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.
But we could switch the starting position around (eg. "You are the one saying there is no God.")
No you can't. The situation is not symmetric in any way shape or form.
The idea of god did not exist until a person invented it.
I can only say there is no god *after* someone invents the myth and then claims it exists.
Mostly it's not worth even denying, usually I just laugh.
You're playing semantics.
Not at all. It's is a fact that the situation is not symmetric.
Anyone who thinks that their disbelief is anything except a matter of faith is deluding themselves.
Twaddle and nothing but.
I don't have faith god doesn't exist. The very idea is stupid and ridiculous from the get go, so much like leprechauns and the tooth fairy it can be rejected out of hand since nobody has ever come up with a single reason to think that such an entity exists. Additionally said mythical entity has never done anything to give anybody any evidence of its existence.
* - If you want to go back and start at the top, you'll find that the people bringing up god are the one's trying to convince everybody else that there is no god. It's not the believers who are running around trying to convert people.
In this thread, sure. In the real world, you might want to look at the millions of murders and the thousands of cultures exterminated for the purpose of spreading these idiotic belief systems.
The only thing older than that star are the creationist jokes on Slashdot.
That is astonishing.
What, your failure to understand basic logic?
Personally I figure I was born without having an opinion on much of anything.
Exactly. Were you born with a belief in god? No, then you were born an atheist.
Until you either come up with the question on your own or somebody presents the question to you, it'd be insane to say that you already have a stance.
You don't need a "stance" to be an atheist. You just need no belief in god. Like everybody is born and stays until they are brainwashed by abusive parents.
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).
-Ed Your last piece of logic is undeniably true. However, it works both ways. You cannot go around saying that it's a FACT that christ existed. If A says it's a FACT something happened, then B is quite correct in asking where is the basis for these "facts". So I can't understand why this is insightful. Also sarcasm is beyond you as well.
Patriotism is a virtue of the vicious
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.
Appears to. A man, who apparently was blind since birth and so forth. Look, magicians are good, they could easily fake all of the above. I once saw two magician (apparently) shoot each other with bullets (marked on the scene by a volunteer), through 3 panes of glass. Both caught the other's bullet with his teeth. Apparently. Yet, though I have no idea how, I do not believe that they actually did this. Same with the Jesus myth: If he actually appeared to do any of the stuff he is attributed to doing, he was faking it. In other words, a charlatan.
As far as I'm aware, nothing about physical phenomena that appear in ordinary life on earth is missing an explanation, if you exclude the open questions of science. What I mean is that there is no scientist that could possibly claim with any degree of certainty that people can do today what Jesus did 2000 years ago. In trying to refute this truth, you reach irrational conclusions via irrational (and wrong) assumptions.Little evidence have survived the 2000 year span. My assumptions is the same with Jesus as anyone else: If they appear to do the impossible, most likely the appearances are deceiving. Of course, giving enough hard evidence, I might revise my idea of impossible, but if anything, the J-myth are backed by very dubious evidence.
As for the historical evidence about the existence of Jesus, someone would think that we have at least 6 accounts for that by His students and one more by Josephus, a jewish historian. I'm really curious about who says otherwise and whether his claims are accepted by the scientific community.Hmm. I forget the name, it was an entire book. Darn, I hate my poor memory. Ah, google to the rescue: Did Jesus exists?. I don't have the necessary feel with the historical community to know whether this is an accepted historical hypothesis. Myself, I am undecided. He was either non-existing, a charlatan or a tool.
People accept Jesus as God himself, because everything He said and did is true. Nothing more, nothing less.Then people are delusional. There is no garden gnomes, no fairies, no flying ufos or any other wishful thinking. There is just you, me and everyone and everything else.
Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by rulers as useful.
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
Can you seriously support that Jesus Christ and His students staged all the events known as "miracles"?
That is one of the possibilities. Most likely it is a combination of fraud, gullibility and wishful thinking.
Can you seriously support that today 13 people can stage everything mentioned in the New Testament in public view without any of the viewers ever finding out the truth, all these in a actively hostile to the performers environment and outside a TV studio?
if you change "any of the viewers" to "any significant number of viewers"...sure.
You basically claim that they were the best magicians of all time, yet no one ever learned their tricks so as to reproduce them today?
That seems pretty standard for magician. But I still didn't say I really believe it was all magician's tricks. Most of it is probably made up.
Why didn't the Jewish scribes and priests preserve the evidence that proves the falseness of the New Testament?
Why would they? The had an agenda.
A big part of the civilised world has been tricked by those 13 people?
Yep. Not the first, nor the last time that has happended. Remember e.g. the corn circles? To quote: The human capacity to believe what it wants to believe, rather than what is likely, or even possible, has never ceased to astound me. "God has not been proven not to exist, ergo, he must exist".
Why did the entire world for 2000 years conspire to hide the evidence to the contrary?
Do you know the Spanish inquisition? Today there is no lack of such evidence.
Does your belief assume that Roman guards, some Jews, Jesus and a dozen of fishermen (among other professions) where able to conspire in order to trick the entire world for 2000 years?
Not the entire world. They tricked enough for long enough, then arms, thumbscrews and human gullibility did the rest.
What was the motive of their performance?
Fame? Greed? Wishful thinking? Desire to make people nice to each other? Wouldn't you lie if it would make men stop raping women? Would you lie for world peace?
Does their writings' spirit and line of thought match this expectation? They were the people to advocate "love each other" for the first time in history, yet they were trying to manipulate everyone else that Jesus is the God? Why? Why cannot I apply your logic to physical phenomena and treat everything as staged by a very clever magician?
You can, but a wall would still hurt you if you walk into it :)
If they appear to do the impossible, most likely the appearances are deceiving
That's not how science works. Science needs evidence and nothing is impossible, provided that it can be observed and reproduced.
What I wrote. But extraordinary claims requires extraordinary proofs, and it is not my job to dig that up for every mad claim out there. I could do little else, then.
the J-myth are backed by very dubious evidence.
Have you tried to see whether what Jesus was claiming is true? That's the essence of His teaching, that's the only way to prove that He was wrong. I know that He was right; so do lots of people around the world. I know it's not of much use to you, that's why I'm offering a way to check my facts.
Thanks, but I'll leave that to others. I am only one man, and I have no time for this particular silliness :) Not that am I against the idea of turning the other cheek and so far. I just don't believe this god silliness.
He was either non-existing, a charlatan or a tool.
What's the evidence that supports that He wasn't who He said He was? What makes that evidence more worthy than mine?
Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by rulers as useful.