After reading the title, you probably think that something is not right here. But what is a star universe or something? If you know how to work the stars, you can get one of them to study its physical properties and to know when it was supposed to be. Stars pass through many changes with aging: their radius, luminosity and temperature change as the burning of fuel. But the life of the stars, in General, depends on two properties with which it is born: the mass and metallicity, that is, the amount present in the elements heavier than hydrogen and helium.
The oldest stars we have found in the Universe, virtually untouched and almost 100% composed of hydrogen and helium left over from the Big Bang. They may be 13 billion years old and the oldest is 14.5 billion years.
And this is a big problem, because the Universe itself is only 13.8 billion years, said Ethan Siegel with Medium.com.
The core of the globular cluster omega Centauri is one of the most crowded regions of the old stars. Here can be a star 12 billion years of age, and the oldest is over 14 billion years, and that’s a problem, because they are older than the Universe itself
Stars, which is older than the Universe itself, cannot be; otherwise it would have existed before the Big Bang. But the Big Bang was the origin of the known Universe, from which came all matter, energy, neutrinos, photons, antimatter, dark matter and even dark energy. Everything contained in our observable Universe began with this event, and all we have today can be traced back to this moment. Therefore, the simplest explanation is that the stars could appear to the Universe itself, must be eliminated.
It may be that we incorrectly withdrew the age of the Universe. We extract it from precise measurements of the Universe on a large scale. Studying a number of features, including:
- defects of density and temperature in the cosmic microwave background, the afterglow of the Big Bang;
- clustering of stars and galaxies at the present time and billions of light years from us;
- speed hublova expansion of the fabric of the Universe;
- the history of star formation and galactic evolution;
as well as many other sources, we get a very consistent picture of the Universe. It consists of 68% dark energy, 27% dark matter, 4.9% of ordinary matter, 0.1% neutrinos, for 0.01% of the radiation, and she is about 13.8 billion years. The uncertainty of the age of the Universe is in the range of 100 million years, so even though the universe can certainly be in the hundreds of millions of years younger or older, 14.5 billion years it gets hardly.
The ESA Gaia mission measured the positions and properties of hundreds of millions of stars near the galactic center and found the most ancient stars known to mankind
There is only one reasonable possibility: apparently, we incorrectly estimate the age of stars. We have analysed hundreds of millions of stars at different stages of their lives. We know how stars are formed and under what conditions; know when and how they ignite nuclear fusion; know how long it continues different stages of synthesis and how effective they are; know how they live and how to die, different types with different masses. In short, astronomy is a serious science, especially if we talk about the stars. In General, the oldest stars are relatively low mass (less massive than our Sun), are low in metals (elements other than hydrogen and helium) and can be older than the galaxy itself.
Globular clusters can be found extremely old stars
Many of them are in globular clusters, which, and that is exactly contain the stars in the 12 billion or, in rare cases, even for 13 billion years. A generation ago people argued that these clusters 14-16 billion years, which created tension in well-established cosmological models, but gradually a better understanding of stellar evolution has led these numbers are in line with the norm. We have developed more advanced methods that improve our powers of observation: by measuring not only carbon, oxygen or iron in these stars, but using the radioactive decay of uranium and thorium. We can directly determine the age of individual stars.
SDSS J102915+172927 is an ancient star in 4140 light years from us, which contains only 1/20 000 of the heavy elements compared to our Sun, and must be age 13 billion years. This is one of the oldest stars in the Universe
In 2007, we were able to measure the star HE 1523-0901, which is 80% the mass of the Sun contains only about 0.1% of the solar iron and is believed to be the age of 13.2 billion years, judging by its abundance of radioactive elements. In 2015, close to the center of the milky Way revealed nine stars that formed 13.5 billion years ago, just after 300 000 000 years after the Big Bang. “These stars were formed before the milky Way and the galaxy formed around them,” says Louis Gouws, co-discoverer of these ancient relics. In fact, one of the nine stars has a less than 0.001% of the solar iron; this type of stars will look for the space telescope James Webb, when will start to work in October 2018.
This is a digitized image of the oldest star in our galaxy. This aging star HD 140283 lies 190 light years from us. The Hubble space telescope said her age is 14.5 billion, plus or minus 800 million years
Most striking of all is the star HD 140283, informally nicknamed Methuselah star. It is only 190 light years from us, and we can measure its brightness, surface temperature and composition; we can also see that she is only beginning to develop in the phase of subgiant to later become a red giant. These pieces of information allow us to bring well-marked the age of the star, and the result is at least cause for concern: of 14.46 billion years. Some properties of the star, like the iron content of 0.4% from solar, they say that the star is old but not the oldest of all. And despite the possible error of 800 million years, Methuselah still creates a certain conflict between the maximum age of stars and the age of the Universe.
The milky Way has not changed for billions of years. But as they Mature the most massive stars cease to exist, and the least massive are starting to turn into subgiants
It is clear today that in the past with this star could happen something that we don’t know today. Maybe she was born more massive and somehow lost their outer layers. Maybe the star has consumed some substance later, which changed its content of heavy elements, bewildering our observations. Maybe we simply do not understand subgiant phase in stellar evolution of ancient stars with low metallicity. Gradually we derive the correct form or let us calculate the age of the oldest stars.
But if we were right in front of us a serious problem. In our Universe cannot exist stars, which is older than the Universe itself. Either something is wrong with the age estimation of these stars, or something wrong with the estimated age of the Universe. Or something else that we still do not understand. This is a great chance to push science in a new direction.
Astronomers find star older than the Universe. How is this possible?
Ilya Hel