Hubble Neatly Captures Messier's Ancient Stars

New submitter DevotedSkeptic writes "Hubble has produced a crisp image of the Messier 56 Globular Cluster. Messier originally noted that this object was nebula without stars. When he originally viewed the cluster in 1779, telescopes were not powerful enough to see more than a fuzzy ball. The crisp focused view we get from Hubble enables us to easily see the globular cluster and ancient stars contained within. Comparing observations from Hubble with results from the standard theory of stellar evolution, scientists have calculated the age Messier 56 at 13 billion years."

Comments

its

[Anonymous Coward]

its full of stars

Re:its

[hairyfeet]

Looking at shots like that I'm always amazed how anyone can truly believe there isn't life out there. Just look at how many stars you have out there, if even only 1 in 10 million have a planet in the right zone you are talking about hundreds of millions of planets!

Now whether or not one of the older civilizations have developed FTL travel and is now poking the monkeys is another debate entirely, but I don't see how anyone can look at a picture like that and believe we're the only ones looking out at pictures like that.

Re:its

[Crosshair84]

Please explain and demonstrate how you get life from non-life. Until biologists get to that point, your view is nothing more than blind faith. You don't know, I don't know, but what we DO know about life is that even its simplest forms is mind boggling complex. Hundreds of thousands of computer code base pairs in even the simplest single celled organism and no realistic theory as to how it got there in the first place. (No, chance is NOT an explanation. "The Monkeys typing Shakespeare theorem" has shown to not be possible. There is neither enough time or enough matter in the universe to go through even a fraction of the possibilities.)

All life on this planet we have found thus far is carbon based. No alternate biochemistry has been shown to be even theoretically realistic
All carbon based life we have found thus far requires liquid water in some form or another. This makes life impossible in the vast majority of the universe.
Most star systems either lack the heavy elements necessary for life (too far from the galactic core) or have too much ionizing radiation for life to survive (too close to the galactic core.)
Most star systems are binary, no life there as stable orbits are not realistically possible.
etc.

The sad fact is that a hundred trillion times zero is still zero.

Could there be life on other planets? Sure. There could also be a monolith in orbit around Jupiter. Given the evidence we do have about life, it's complexities, and limits, one should be skeptical about the possibility of life outside of Earths atmosphere until that evidence of its existence is shown.

Re:its

[Byrel]

Regardless of how ridiculous you may feel a scientific statement to be, citing an unrelated experiment and indulging in ad hominem is not appropriate or helpful. The basic claim was clearly falsifiable: the complexity of a simple living organism is sufficiently great as to make it unlikely to have developed on any other planet in the universe. What, pray tell, does an experiment demonstrating the production of amino acids with a spark demonstrate? That it is possible for a system of some complexity to develop? That has no bearing at all on Crosshair's point, which is not based on possibility, but probability.

Instead, you should try actual running some figures through the Drake equation. Suppose we figure the probability per galaxy, and take the Milky Way as a rough mean galaxy. So, we're looking at around 6.1e10 FGK-stars, which are reasonably similar to our sun. (We have to operate under the assumption that we're calculating the probability of simple life as we know it. Otherwise, the variability gets too large; we DON'T know what it would look like, or where it could develop.) Now, we find habitable zone planets around about 3% of stars we survey. Suppose half are rocky, leaving us with 9.2e8 habitable zone, rocky planets.

Now a lot of those are in globular clusters, etc. where some folks think life is less likely to develop. So lets discount 95% of those planets, leaving us with 4.6e7 planets. Or about 50 million habitable planets per galaxy. With 1e11 galaxies in the universe, that leaves us with 4.6e18 habitable planets. Now comes the tricky part. How do we know the probability of the spontaneous development of life in the history of the universe is greater the 1 in 4.6e18? *Shrugs* I don't think anyone really has a good handle on what the probability is, but most folks would put it significantly higher than that.

Really, all Crosshair advocated was the Rare Earth hypothesis. It isn't completely mainstream, but I'm not aware of anyone who thinks it's discredited.

The Day we Found the Universe

[esldude]

http://www.amazon.com/The-Day-We-Found-Universe/dp/0307276600/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1345962369&sr=8-1&keywords=the+day+we+discovered+the+universe#reader_0307276600 Delightful book about how we came to figure out there was more than the milky way, and just how much more. Details the history of the instruments used, the scientists involved and the ideas that battled it out until we understood how big things were. The Hubble is in the lineage of important instruments helping us learn how big all of space is. All the way back to 13 billion years or so of it.

Lessons for editors, #402

[wonkey_monkey]

"Hubble has produced a crisp image of the Messier 56 Globular Cluster. Messier originally noted that this object was a nebula without stars. When he originally viewed the cluster in 1779, telescopes were not powerful enough to see more than a fuzzy ball. The crisp focused view we get from Hubble enables us to easily see the globular cluster and the ancient stars contained within. Comparing observations from Hubble with results from the standard theory of stellar evolution, scientists have calculated the age of Messier 56 at 13 billion years."

And this was an easy one.

Uhm, yes. Over 7 billion that we know of.

[VortexCortex]

I wonder if there is a God of Gods?

Or do you? A question only you can answer...

And do the Gods go around killing each other in the name of themselves?

Yes.

And are there Gods who don't believe in Gods?

Yes.

What would those be called?

On this planet they're known as Humans, regardless of whether they believe in themselves.

How does Mitt Romney fit in this?

The Universe is really big; Yes, large enough for even his ego. The planet on the other hand...

Can be find a way?

No, "be" isn't a proper subject.

And if Romney becomes God, and he dies (Gods die?), does that mean Ryan becomes a God?

Woah, slow down. Of course gods die. Even the mythical ones have been dying ever since we started dreaming them up. See also: Greek Mythology.

When a god dies it doesn't spawn a new god, otherwise that "When Animals Attack" show would have an ending more like "Planet of the Apes".

My God, the guy is barely out of diapers! And what of George Burns?

I'm pretty sure "My God" implies slavery... George Burns was the best God, IMO.

Re:13 Billion Years!

[shoor]

How is it possible that they date the light we see from this messier's star cluster to be about 13 billion years old?

I'm not an astronomer but I read 'science for the layman' type books and watch the documentaries on PBS. I was wondering about the age of these stars as stated in the article compared to the age of the universe myself. But, they aren't saying the light we see is 13 billion years old, anymore than the light we see from the sun is 5 billion years old.

Presumably these stars formed in one of the first galaxies, and they've been around ever since, somehow eventually being captured as a group by the Milky Way.