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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.
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.
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?
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?
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
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?
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.
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
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.