Short answer: it's only older than the universe if you ignore the error bars of the estimate.
We've been here before, with stars older than the age of the universe. Last time, we thought that there was only one kind of Cepheid variable. This lead to underestimating the age of the universe. Later, astronomers realized the nearby Cepheid variables (used for calibrating the period/luminosity relationship) differed systematically from the bright Cepheid variables that we could see in distance galaxies.
Understanding the difference between Type I and Type II Cepheid variables lead to a greater estimate for the age of the universe, resolving the difficulty. So I expect some interesting astronomy to come out of tracking down the cause of this discrepancy.
A great cosmology faq, answering this and a lot of other questions: http://www.astro.ucla.edu/~wright/cosmology_faq.html
> It's composition meant the star must have come into being before iron became commonplace.
Hypothesis 1: the star formed in a way that did not involve or produce a lot of iron.
Hypothesis 2: the star is older than the universe itself.
Clearly, hypothesis 2 is the more likely.
This remind me of a similar story with the age of the earth and the solar system. Scientists using new methods were starting to discover that Earth was far, far older than originally predicted...so old, that it seemed to predate our sun. It turns out it our estimates of the solar system's age were wrong, but it took some time to figure out why.
I imagine something similar is going on here. The article mentions that once they got an age older than the universe, they started looking at how to make the star younger...finally by acknowledging the margin of error in estimates. That sounds like bad science to me.
I think, by Occam's Razor, the most likely explanation is that there's a skybox surrounding the solar system that Voyager 1 may run into any day now, like Truman Burbank at the end of The Truman Show. It seems to be a more parsimonious explanation of the available facts that we're looking at the result of a super duper planatarium projector, as opposed to an actual vast and frequently inexplicable universe.
I was hoping for some weird time-bending effect from general relativity, but no, it’s just that the ages are within each other’s error bars.
This reminds me of Iain Bank’s Excession. Great book, strongly recommend it.
Why can't the star be older because of relativity? I imagine that, particularly in the early universe while everything was nearer to everything else, relative background gravity was higher (and thus relative time) is different than now. Would the star not age at a different rate if it's a remnant from violent beginnings of the universe?
The most likely answer is that either the measurement or the theory is wrong. Both are probably about as likely.
It reminds me of the same question asked in this book, "The Birth of Time: How Astronomers Measured the Age of the Universe" by John Gribbin. The bottom line was that the calculations always have some approximations, which can throws off a number by a large factor.
Did anyone read the article and get a feeling it was mostly just a fluff piece describing how we're refining our ability to tell the ages of stars?
Start over space theories all over again. Lets not build our assumptions on previous generation findings.
Only if we take path of how the previous geniuses went through we will have a flawless exploration. Instead of doing that, if we work on someone else's work, its like eating someone else's recipie and trying to remake the tase of it without understanding the ingredients in it.
Given the norm for question titles, the answer must be "It can't." Also simply based on what a universe is.
What we have are just different estimates for the age of our universe. And none of them involve simple measurement, obviously. So the challenge is finding the artifact(s) that generate the disagreement.
Does the microwave background come from the centre of the universe where the big bang was; and the light from stars on the far side, flying in the opposite direction to us, take longer to reach us than the microwave background does?
I would REALLY love to read this, but space.com is one of those asshole sites that wants to take a gigabyte of memory (I'm not joking) and wants a full 30 to 45 seconds of CPU just to load the page.
What came first, the photon or the electron? Can a photon be emitted without a change in energy state?
I’m new here, so instead of answering questions is the protocol just to downvote?
wow what an interesting article. Finding not one, but multiple stars that are much older than the predicted age of the universe means something is likely very wrong with one of our theories: dark energy, star aging, or using the cosmic background as a measure of the universe's age.
I was thinking maybe it was traveling a large fraction of c and there was a relativity thing going on
HN is making me wish I studied astronomy, such cool stuff.
Nonsense, the universe is only 6000 years old....
and it's a Libra.
Okay... This implies the light was stretched along with the space, right? Because otherwise, the photons would just... Never reach here if space between us and the light expanded faster than c.
Which universe?
Tl; dr: They don't know either
> It's composition meant the star must have come into being before iron became commonplace.
Hypothesis 1: the star formed in a way that did not involve or produce a lot of iron.
Hypothesis 2: the star is older than the universe itself.
Clearly, hypothesis 2 is the more likely.A
Jesus, what an aggresive website: https://i.imgur.com/1aCo9DV.png.
A question - how common are such old stars? Because it is right in our backyard. 190 light years away are nothing. And if those stars are rare - that makes our neighborhood unusual - we have life and some of the oldest object in the universe in almost the same spot.
Here we go again... "scientists would look at the ripples in the fabric of space and time". Am I the only one who finds this expression very confusing? What fabric? There is no fabric. Space and time are coordinates. They do not exist physically at all. There cannot be a fabric of space and time.
GN-z11 is a galaxy that's 32 billion light years away. Here's the note from wikipedia:
At first glance, the distance of 32 billion light-years (9.8 billion parsecs) might seem impossibly far away in a Universe that is only 13.8 billion (short scale) years old, where a light-year is the distance light travels in a year, and where nothing can travel faster than the speed of light. However, because of the expansion of the universe, the distance of 2.66 billion light-years between GN-z11 and the Milky Way at the time when the light was emitted increased by a factor of (z+1)=12.1 to a distance of 32.2 billion light-years during the 13.4 billion years it has taken the light to reach us.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GN-z11#Notes