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.'"

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:the creationists will not like this

[Anonymous Coward]

Why get your underwear all knotted up over it?

because it's childish to believe in god?

Re:"Right around the same time"

[Kristoph]

Actually, given it's composition, it's likely a second or third generation star (although I have not RTFA so I could be full of crap). Anyway, relevant stuff certainly did happen in those 500 million years.

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Re:the creationists will not like this

[rbarreira]

Was that before or after punishing us for doing something which was his fault? Him being omnipotent and all, should have known what we were up to when he created us...

Re:Star of Christian Mythology

[setagllib]

As typical as it is to suggest the acts of JC are hugely exaggerated, by modern standards they're pretty tame. All over the world, especially in some of the older surviving civilizations like Russia, China, India, etc. there are people who can show you much more impressive feats at a moment's natice, and they don't claim to have inherited any powers of God. There's just a lot about science we haven't charted yet, but that doesn't mean the practice of unscientific feats is impossible. As has been said, absence of evidence isn't evidence of absence. While I'm not suggesting JC performed the feats attributed to him, I am suggesting it wouldn't be otherworldly if somebody did. It's unscientific to insist upon impossibility, despite what most people seem to instinctively believe about science.

Re:the creationists will not like this

[hldn]

I'll be over there pondering some of the current science, you know, the observable stuff that you can apply the scientific method to?

you mean like, god?

tired of seeing religious people bashed as idiots over and over again because they disbelieve something that is based on a number of assumptions

you mean like, god?

but until a method of measuring it's age that doesn't depend on a huge number of assumptions is developed I don't see any reason to concern myself with it honestly

you mean like, god?

There is absolutely no proof

oh, you mean like, god?

Re:Age of the universe.

[Weston O'Reilly]

But are these points relevant? Did the article feature young earthers criticizing the claims in any way? I don't understand why we have to have the religion debate every time an article mentions a date more than 6000 years in the past.

Re:Heavy elements?

[pyrrhonist]

my understanding is that the big bang didn't start from a single chunk of mass at some defined point, rather that it occurred everywhere at the same time.

In a way, yes. It started as a singularity. There was no mass or, "everywhere".

If you were somehow instantly able to travel to the edge 13.7 billion light years away, what would you see? I would guess that there is no edge,

Correct, there is no edge. If you traveled in a straight line in any direction, eventually you would reach your starting point.

At least, that's the current theory.

Re:the creationists will not like this

[Darby]

Why? Because I suggest that someone prove a negative and you're going to tell me that "you can't prove a negative."

No, because you're just begging the question.

You're presupposing that there is some merit to the idea of God in the first place.
You're the one proposing one, you're the one who must prove it.

I have no need to disprove god any more than I need to disprove the tooth fairy.

That is the deep flaw in your argument. It's a fallacy from the start.

Re:the creationists will not like this

[wanerious]

You raise an excellent point. Fortunately, we astronomers have also thought of this. And the geologists before us.

We have very good computer models of stellar evolution that compute yields of basically all the elements in the periodic table from core-collapse supernovae, which is the type of explosion that would generate all the elements above iron. These have been checked against observed abundances and agree very well. In addition, we have another independent check in that we can compare the ages derived through radiometric means to those derived from globular cluster ages. These also agree well. And, to further make the case, it was noted in the article that about 6 different species of radioactive isotopes were observed, so it would be very unusual for *all 6* isotopes to have an anomalous abundance in just the right way as to make the ages all agree. I've worked with a number of people in this sub-field; for what it's worth, they really seem to know what they're doing.

I don't support modding religious people down merely because they disbelieve something, though I must say that, as a fellow Christian, it's distressing to see lots of non-specialists assume an air of superiority and bash a scientific field that they (in some cases even admit) they know basically nothing about. It's often charitable to assume that these scientists are, in most cases, very smart people who spend their whole professional lives engaged in the study of these phenomena. It is *highly* unlikely that any joe off the street is going to raise any intellectually serious issues that hadn't been thought of already. Scientists have the right authority to speak on behalf of their science. If you don't want to believe it, for whatever reason, that's up to you, though you might do well to *try* to understand why they say the things they do. It's fascinating stuff.

Re:the creationists will not like this

[Darby]

But we could switch the starting position around (eg. "You are the one saying there is no God.")

No you can't. The situation is not symmetric in any way shape or form.
The idea of god did not exist until a person invented it.

I can only say there is no god *after* someone invents the myth and then claims it exists.
Mostly it's not worth even denying, usually I just laugh.

You're playing semantics.

Not at all. It's is a fact that the situation is not symmetric.

Anyone who thinks that their disbelief is anything except a matter of faith is deluding themselves.

Twaddle and nothing but.
I don't have faith god doesn't exist. The very idea is stupid and ridiculous from the get go, so much like leprechauns and the tooth fairy it can be rejected out of hand since nobody has ever come up with a single reason to think that such an entity exists. Additionally said mythical entity has never done anything to give anybody any evidence of its existence.



* - If you want to go back and start at the top, you'll find that the people bringing up god are the one's trying to convince everybody else that there is no god. It's not the believers who are running around trying to convert people.

In this thread, sure. In the real world, you might want to look at the millions of murders and the thousands of cultures exterminated for the purpose of spreading these idiotic belief systems.

Re:the creationists will not like this

[ChromeAeonium]

The only thing older than that star are the creationist jokes on Slashdot.

Re:the creationists will not like this

[Anonymous Coward]

* - If you want to go back and start at the top, you'll find that the people bringing up god are the one's trying to convince everybody else that there is no god. It's not the believers who are running around trying to convert people.

Funny.

I don't remember the last time it was atheists knocking on my door to 'bring me the good news'.

Re:Age of the universe.

[agent1999]

Uh. Consider this 'fact' - three of the Republican US Presidential Candidates said last week that they "Didn't Believe In Evolution." Is anyone actually trying to say that the faith is more highly regarded than the science - despite the overwhelming evidence supporting the science? If Faith trumps Science, we're no better than the Taliban - just different. The age of the known universe is absolutely relevant.

Re:Star of Christian Mythology

[hachete]

Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

-Ed

Your last piece of logic is undeniably true. However, it works both ways. You cannot go around saying that it's a FACT that christ existed. If A says it's a FACT something happened, then B is quite correct in asking where is the basis for these "facts". So I can't understand why this is insightful. Also sarcasm is beyond you as well.

Re:Don't take those Pastors & Darwins either..

[Anonymous Coward]

What is your problem with humans evolving from apes?

The same problem I would have if someone described my brother as my ancestor: it's simply wrong. My brother and I share the same parents, but he's not my ancestor, and nor am I his ancestor.

Of course we did not evolve from modern apes but from creatures who we, if we met them today, would probably call apes.

You're completely missing the point. The term "ape", in normal usage, refers to animals that live now: chimpanzees, gorillas and so on. If you say, "we evolved from apes", you're implying we evolved from chimpanzees, gorillas, et al., which is absolutely not what evolution implies.

We did not evolve from other animals living now. Amongst other thing, this means we should not expect to find a "missing link" that is halfway between us and any particular species of ape. Why not? Because chimpanzees, gorillas, et al. have been evolving too. Our most recent common ancestor was thus not some sort of amalgam of modern humans and chimpanzees (or gorillas, etc.).

I can't count the number of times I've read creationist comments claiming the lack of "half-man/half-gorilla" (or "half-man/half-chimpanzee", etc.) fossils disproves evolution, and this is a direct result of misinterpreting evolutionary theory as implying that currently living species evolved from other currently living species.

And we share common ancestors with every known creature.

Precisely. Would you therefore claim we evolved from every known creature? Such a claim is patently absurd.

Btw. zoologically speaking we are apes!

Zoologically speaking we're all primates, mammals and animals too. I fail to see how that is in the least bit relevant.

At the end of the day, saying "we evolved from apes" spreads the misleading idea that evolution means some sort of magical transformation from one currently existing species to another currently existing species. When presented this way, it's no wonder that seemingly intelligent people can reject the idea. When presented in terms of what the theory actually means, it is far more intuitive, and less likely to be rejected by intelligent people.

Re:Age of the universe.

[mikkelm]

To comment on something completely off-topic, none of the major branches of christianity preach intolerance either, but a whole lot of people of those religious convictions are intolerant in the name of their religion. Just like a good deal of them believe that the universe is only a few thousand years old.

A religion is what its followers make it. There's nothing stupid about what the GP said.

Re:Star of Christian Mythology

[EsbenMoseHansen]

You're saying that people that were known to be blind since birth, were actually not? People who are missing a limb can be healed by modern magicians? A man who dies because of sickness and is in the grave for 4 days and begins to decompose can actually be alive? Can you seriously support this claim?

Appears to. A man, who apparently was blind since birth and so forth. Look, magicians are good, they could easily fake all of the above. I once saw two magician (apparently) shoot each other with bullets (marked on the scene by a volunteer), through 3 panes of glass. Both caught the other's bullet with his teeth. Apparently. Yet, though I have no idea how, I do not believe that they actually did this. Same with the Jesus myth: If he actually appeared to do any of the stuff he is attributed to doing, he was faking it. In other words, a charlatan.

As far as I'm aware, nothing about physical phenomena that appear in ordinary life on earth is missing an explanation, if you exclude the open questions of science. What I mean is that there is no scientist that could possibly claim with any degree of certainty that people can do today what Jesus did 2000 years ago. In trying to refute this truth, you reach irrational conclusions via irrational (and wrong) assumptions.

Little evidence have survived the 2000 year span. My assumptions is the same with Jesus as anyone else: If they appear to do the impossible, most likely the appearances are deceiving. Of course, giving enough hard evidence, I might revise my idea of impossible, but if anything, the J-myth are backed by very dubious evidence.

As for the historical evidence about the existence of Jesus, someone would think that we have at least 6 accounts for that by His students and one more by Josephus, a jewish historian. I'm really curious about who says otherwise and whether his claims are accepted by the scientific community.

Hmm. I forget the name, it was an entire book. Darn, I hate my poor memory. Ah, google to the rescue: Did Jesus exists? [amazon.com]. I don't have the necessary feel with the historical community to know whether this is an accepted historical hypothesis. Myself, I am undecided. He was either non-existing, a charlatan or a tool.

People accept Jesus as God himself, because everything He said and did is true. Nothing more, nothing less.

Then people are delusional. There is no garden gnomes, no fairies, no flying ufos or any other wishful thinking. There is just you, me and everyone and everything else.

Re:"Right around the same time"

[jmtpi]

Now a bit of a tangent, while not straying from the subject: I remember in the mid-nineties there was a strange snafu in the world of astrophysics, as the apparent age of globular clusters made them older than the Universe itself! As it turned out, of course, the star dating technique was wrong and off by a couple of billion years. Just how fined-tuned is this new dating technique?

Actually, I think the resolution of this problem was on the other side. The old estimates of 8 or 9 billion years for the age of the universe came from calculations where it was assumed that the universe was matter-dominated. This was indeed a problem since the globular cluster measurements were in the >10 billion year range. Thanks to WMAP and others we now know that the universe is dark-energy dominated, and the age estimate of the universe has been nailed down with relative precision at 13.7 billion years (with an error of ~2%).

From the paper [arxiv.org], it looks like this age measurement has O(10%) uncertainties. The authors don't even try to create an overall error on the measurement, instead giving a large table of various uncertainties. (Note: I'm not an astrophysicist, so I'm not used to looking at this style of paper.) From the paper: "Despite their large uncertainties the age limits provided by HE 1523-0901 and CS 31082-001 are in good agreement with the WMAP result of 13.7 Gyr for the age of the Universe." I would have phrased it replacing "Despite" with "Within", but that's just semantics.

Re:Star of Christian Mythology

[EsbenMoseHansen]

Can you seriously support that Jesus Christ and His students staged all the events known as "miracles"?

That is one of the possibilities. Most likely it is a combination of fraud, gullibility and wishful thinking.

Can you seriously support that today 13 people can stage everything mentioned in the New Testament in public view without any of the viewers ever finding out the truth, all these in a actively hostile to the performers environment and outside a TV studio?

if you change "any of the viewers" to "any significant number of viewers"...sure.

You basically claim that they were the best magicians of all time, yet no one ever learned their tricks so as to reproduce them today?

That seems pretty standard for magician. But I still didn't say I really believe it was all magician's tricks. Most of it is probably made up.

Why didn't the Jewish scribes and priests preserve the evidence that proves the falseness of the New Testament?

Why would they? The had an agenda.

A big part of the civilised world has been tricked by those 13 people?

Yep. Not the first, nor the last time that has happended. Remember e.g. the corn circles? To quote: The human capacity to believe what it wants to believe, rather than what is likely, or even possible, has never ceased to astound me. "God has not been proven not to exist, ergo, he must exist".

Why did the entire world for 2000 years conspire to hide the evidence to the contrary?

Do you know the Spanish inquisition? Today there is no lack of such evidence.

Does your belief assume that Roman guards, some Jews, Jesus and a dozen of fishermen (among other professions) where able to conspire in order to trick the entire world for 2000 years?

Not the entire world. They tricked enough for long enough, then arms, thumbscrews and human gullibility did the rest.

What was the motive of their performance?

Fame? Greed? Wishful thinking? Desire to make people nice to each other? Wouldn't you lie if it would make men stop raping women? Would you lie for world peace?

Does their writings' spirit and line of thought match this expectation? They were the people to advocate "love each other" for the first time in history, yet they were trying to manipulate everyone else that Jesus is the God? Why? Why cannot I apply your logic to physical phenomena and treat everything as staged by a very clever magician?

You can, but a wall would still hurt you if you walk into it :)

If they appear to do the impossible, most likely the appearances are deceiving

That's not how science works. Science needs evidence and nothing is impossible, provided that it can be observed and reproduced.

What I wrote. But extraordinary claims requires extraordinary proofs, and it is not my job to dig that up for every mad claim out there. I could do little else, then.

the J-myth are backed by very dubious evidence.

Have you tried to see whether what Jesus was claiming is true? That's the essence of His teaching, that's the only way to prove that He was wrong. I know that He was right; so do lots of people around the world. I know it's not of much use to you, that's why I'm offering a way to check my facts.

Thanks, but I'll leave that to others. I am only one man, and I have no time for this particular silliness :) Not that am I against the idea of turning the other cheek and so far. I just don't believe this god silliness.

He was either non-existing, a charlatan or a tool.

What's the evidence that supports that He wasn't who He said He was? What makes that evidence more worthy than mine?