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Oldest Known Star In the Universe Discovered
Zothecula writes "A team of astronomers at The Australian National University working on a five-year project to produce the first comprehensive digital survey of the southern sky has discovered the oldest known star in the Universe. The star dates back 13.7 billion years, only shortly after the Big Bang itself. It's also nearby (at least, from a cosmological perspective) — about 6,000 light-years away. The star is notable for the very small amount of iron it contains (abstract). The lead researcher, Stefan Keller, said, 'To make a star like our Sun, you take the basic ingredients of hydrogen and helium from the Big Bang and add an enormous amount of iron – the equivalent of about 1,000 times the Earth's mass. To make this ancient star, you need no more than an Australia-sized asteroid of iron and lots of carbon. It's a very different recipe that tells us a lot about the nature of the first stars and how they died.'"
I thought William Shatner was the oldest star.
The star is notable for the very small amount of iron it contains (abstract). The lead researcher, Stefan Keller, said..
ISWYDT
If he is a lead researcher, what does he know about iron? I found in my old astronomy textbook a list of the elements that make-up the top 99.99997% of the mass of the sun. Lead is not in that list. Why have a lead expert involved instead of an iron researcher involved? The reason we're interested in this star is because of the low mass of iron, not lead.
It's an LED star, not an incandescent...
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