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

Age of the universe.

[saintlupus]

Of course, according to some pastors, that star is only a few thousand years old. It barely predates The Flood.

--saint

Re:Age of the universe.

[goombah99]

A thousand, a billion, it still wants you off it's lawn.

"Right around the same time"

[LBArrettAnderson]

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" ?

Re:"Right around the same time"

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd like to Bang Stars for Profit as well!

Re:"Right around the same time"

[Paradise Pete]

Of course, who's to say that their method of dating stars isn't wrong.

I'm not sure you've read your own sig.

Aye

[Mateo_LeFou]

"a newly found start may be as old as the universe itself"

Well, that's why they call it a 'start' isn't it?

Heavy elements?

[Tablizer]

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?

Re:Heavy elements?

[Anonymous Coward]

Because of the higher density of the universe back then, the first few dozen generations of star were probably all super-massive giants that only have a lifespan of between 10 and 100 million years. The first supernova-generated elements were introduced to the universe very early, in fact production of them used to be orders of magnitudes higher at the beginning.

Re:Heavy elements?

[Graymalkin]

Supergiant and hypergiant stars (like Eta Carinae and SN 2006gy's progenitor) don't have long lifetimes and were likely prevalent in the early universe. Their deaths could have formed a lot of the heavy elements in HE 1523-0901. Five hundred million years is plenty of time for a lot of 100-120 solar mass giants to burn out and go supernova. It's likely the remnants of these early giants produced most of the stellar nurseries the next generation of less massive stars were born in.

Re:Heavy elements?

[Agent Orange]

That's correct. The star is metal-poor -- it's has an iron abundance (the standard measure of how much metals a star has) of [Fe/H] = -2.95. This is a lograthmic scale, and means that, on a scale where the sun is 0.0, HE1523 has about 1/1000th the amount of iron. The bracket notation means [Fe/H] = log10{N(Fe}/N(H)} - log10{N(Fe)/N(H)}_sun...i.e. the logarithmic difference of the number of atoms of Fe, compared to hydrogen, normalised to the solar ratio.

But the kicker is that HE1523 is very heavily r-process enhanced too...which means that it has a lot r-process, neutron-capture elements (think Uranium and thorium), compared to how much iron it has. HE1523 has [r/Fe] = 1.8....which means it has a 100 times more r-process heavy metals compared to iron, than does the sun.

BOTH of these factors are very important for this measurement, because you need to have very few metals, very high signal-to-noise data, very high resolution, and very strong r-process abundance, in order to be able to observe the uranium line. Anna needed 7.5hrs of VLT time to get a signal-to-noise ratio of about 350 or so...much higher than the S/N ~ 50-75 that we got from Magellan.

You can get a pdf of the paper here. Check out Fig 2, which shows the relevant part of the spectrum, with the Uranium line. See how it's right next to the booming Fe line...that's why we need a low iron abundance to do this work.

Re:I wonder

[AbsoluteXyro]

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.

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:I wonder

[bitt3n]

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.