Ancient Star Found, Estimated at 13.2 Billion Years Old 377
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.'"
Age of the universe. (Score:5, Funny)
--saint
Re:Age of the universe. (Score:5, Funny)
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Yes, I wish we didn't have to bring it up, but sadly, it's not off topic.
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Re:Don't take those Pastors & Darwins either.. (Score:4, Informative)
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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
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A religion is what its followers make it. There's nothing stupid about what the GP said.
"Right around the same time" (Score:5, Funny)
Since when was "right around the same time" the same thing as "500 million years later" ?
Re:"Right around the same time" (Score:5, Funny)
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Of course, who's to say that their method of dating stars isn't wrong.
Re:"Right around the same time" (Score:5, Funny)
I'm not sure you've read your own sig.
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Especially when the precision of measuring things near the beginning of time is at the femtosecond scale. 1.57788E28 ticks is very different from 1 tick.
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]{
So let there be light (Score:5, Funny)
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So, if you have all the mass at the "center" of the universe, relativity will stretch time, and 1 day will expand to be huge... the second day will be shorter, etc.
He even mapped the events of those initial days to points in the cosmic birth (ie, creation of light, creation of baryons, formation of planets,
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Re:"Right around the same time" (Score:5, Funny)
"Great! I just have to get dressed, so I should be ready right around the same time."
Re:"Right around the same time" (Score:5, Funny)
*Sigh!* Today's youth, always impatient.
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Since 13 Billion years later, that's when.
Re:"Right around the same time" (Score:5, Funny)
1. Bang
2. Stars
3. Profit
Re:"Right around the same time" (Score:5, Funny)
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By his logic mankind did not exist before the 19th century, when photos were invented. That's a "-1 cretin" mod if I ever saw one.
Re:Star of Christian Mythology (Score:4, Insightful)
-Ed
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He would have been just your ordinary religious fanatic.
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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 w
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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 i
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Charismatic cult leader with a messiah complex. His cult members to exaggerate their stories about him after his death.
Aye (Score:5, Funny)
Well, that's why they call it a 'start' isn't it?
Heavy elements? (Score:5, Interesting)
I thought early stars had very few heavy elements because there had yet to be multiple generations of stars to produce such. Thus, where did the heavy elements come from?
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The Big Bang?
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Re:Heavy elements? (Score:5, Informative)
The Big Bang stopped more or less at helium, and things like uranium have to cook in non-equilibrium processes like supernovas.
500 million years is enough time for that to happen, since a supergiant star can race through its entire lifetime in a few million years. This could have formed from the remnants of one of the earliest supernovas, or it could be several generations old.
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Re:Heavy elements? (Score:5, Informative)
But the kicker is that HE1523 is very heavily r-process enhanced too...which means that it has a lot r-process, neutron-capture elements (think Uranium and thorium), compared to how much iron it has. HE1523 has [r/Fe] = 1.8....which means it has a 100 times more r-process heavy metals compared to iron, than does the sun.
BOTH of these factors are very important for this measurement, because you need to have very few metals, very high signal-to-noise data, very high resolution, and very strong r-process abundance, in order to be able to observe the uranium line. Anna needed 7.5hrs of VLT time to get a signal-to-noise ratio of about 350 or so...much higher than the S/N ~ 50-75 that we got from Magellan.
You can get a pdf of the paper here [arxiv.org]. Check out Fig 2, which shows the relevant part of the spectrum, with the Uranium line. See how it's right next to the booming Fe line...that's why we need a low iron abundance to do this work.
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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.
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Large stars burn out much more quickly than stars like Sol. Though none of them last long enough for intelligent life to develop in their solar system, they are essential to life in the univ
Heavy elements? (Score:2, Interesting)
0.5 billion years seems quite quick for a few stars to go super nova, then condense into another star with the required heavy elements in.
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Re:Heavy elements? (Score:5, Informative)
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Old as the universe? (Score:4, Funny)
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"Ancient Star Found, 13.2 Billion Years Old" (Score:4, Funny)
Now that we know where Oa is. . . (Score:2)
Creation of the elements -- nucleosynthesis primer (Score:5, Informative)
The big bang forms hydrogen, dueterium, some helium, and a tiny amount of lithium. In fact, the theory of what should be formed (called Big Bang Nucleosynthesis), and what is observed, agree incredibly well.
Most stars just burn hydrogen into helium, fusing the two hydrogen atoms. More massive stars burn hotter, and so they can ignite helium burning, forming carbon, nitrogen, oxygen etc. The hotter the star gets, the heavier things can be fused, all the way up to iron. All of these processes *release* energy, if you can get it hot enough to start the reaction.
After iron, to make heavier elements you have to *put in* energy, so the way elements are formed is different. Instead of fusing two things together, you now just add a single neutron to the nucleus. This is a very different process (called neutron capture)...and can happen veeeery slowly (in stars) or very rapidly (in supernova explosions).
So, uranium and thorium are both elements which are made in the rapid process (r-process) -- they are only made in supernova explosions...because in a supernova, the neutron density is very high, so catching one is more likely.
Anyway...the point of all this is that, by observing uranium, we KNOW there had to have been at least one dying star going supernova, which made the uranium. Then that gas collapsed again later, to make anna's star.
So far, no-one has yet managed to find a first-generation star, but it's a big area of research at the moment, and is one of the things anna is trying hard to find. By looking at these very old stars, we get a good picture of how a supernova works, because we see the product of ONLY ONE of them. With young stars, there might have been hundreds, all polluting the gas at different times...and disentangling that is really tough.
As for the age of the universe, WMAP [nasa.gov] told us that very precisely -- 13.7Gyr (with an error of only ~0.1Gyr). The age we derived from HE1523 is much less precise...but nucleocosmochronometry (stellar age dating), is an incredibly tough thing to do, but it does offer independant confirmationg of the WMAP result.
ATHF 2 (Score:5, Funny)
An alien with a secret.
An astronomer with a past.
A galaxy thorn asunder.
An astronaut on the edge.
A hidden moon.
A mythical planet.
An ancient.. mythical.. secret.. planet sun guy.
And a flaming chicken.
In 2009, none of these things, happen in ATHF 2.
Except the flaming chicken.
Re:I wonder (Score:5, Interesting)
Doubtful. All objects in the universe are moving away from each other. We know this because when we look up into the sky, everything is red shifted... which would seem to indicate that Earth is the center of the universe, but it is not.
How is that possible? You can run a universal expansion experiment at home with a black magic marker and a balloon. First, blow up the balloon and draw a group of dots on it so that you can observe all the dots at once (don't draw dots on opposite sides of the balloon). Deflate the balloon. Now, choose a dot on the balloon, and watch it while you inflate the balloon. You will notice the dot remains stationary while all of the other dots move away from it. Deflate the balloon, choose another dot, and repeat the observation. You will see that this completely different spot also appears to remain stationary while all other dots move away from it. This is similar to what is happening with the expansion of the universe... and I would hazard a guess that such a mechanic makes pinpointing the origin nigh impossible.
Re:I wonder (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:I wonder (Score:4, Funny)
Re:I wonder (Score:4, Interesting)
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Huh, why would the Earth be different from everything else? I mean if everything is the center of the Universe why wouldn't the Earth also be the center of the Universe?
Re:I wonder (Score:4, Informative)
Re:I wonder (Score:5, Interesting)
If by "origin" you mean "point of origin", then we already have that answer. The big bang was not an explosion which occurred at one point in space, spewing matter and energy out everywhere. The big bang was a big explosion OF space, and spewed out a glob of space which began to expand, making points more distant from each other.
So you cannot ask "where" the big bang occurred, because if you take all the points in space as far as can be seen, all of those points in space were at one single point at the moment of the big bang. So the best answer to "where" is "everywhere".
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So the best answer to "Where is everywhere?" is... What? I've been looking for everywhere forever.
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The "big bang" is still happening and we observe it as the expansion of the visable universe. You are "inside" the "pinpoint" and can never know anything about the "outside", therfore the "origin" is "everywhere". However, run time backwards and the "origin" of the big bang will always turn out to be where you were standing when you made the mesurements. (Liberal use of quotes because language does not accurately convey the strangeness of it all)
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Re:the creationists will not like this (Score:5, Insightful)
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Well, you've never set up your pet (cat, dog) do something stupid so you can have some fun?
I bet God's not very different. I bet he laughed his ass off while getting Adam and Eve's asses kicked out of Heaven:
God: "Wow, that was funny. So what do I do next. Oh yea, I'll write the Bible. Hi-la-ri-ous..!".
Re:the creationists will not like this (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:the creationists will not like this (Score:5, Funny)
"Let there be light." Eergh! (buries His head under the covers for a few hundred million years.)
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Newton actually entertained the idea that the universe is the result of God's active attention, so it was being literally supported every instant by an act of God's will. If God ever stopped paying attention, the universe would simply blink out. Of course, it could blink back in at any future (or past!) state of evolution just as easily.
From a computational perspective, one might look at this as a serialization issue. It is perfectly possible t
God needs motive???? (Score:2)
God can do anything without the need of motive.
Of course HE may have motive if HE wants some
It is soo much easier to debate on the creationist side.
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That's something a Bible analyst and historian said in Discovery regarding people who take the Bible for a valid scientific and historic source you can take literally: The Bible is just like a man. Torture it enough and it'll say anything.
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I'd love to see your "evidence" of god.
In fact, if you could give hard evidence that god exists, I would convert to christianity immediately. But I won't hold my breath.
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Personally, I do not believe in God, but I know that it is because I choose that belief. I am not some cold rationalist with mountains of evidence to prove my position. It's purely a matter of faith.
Let me ask you this, do you believe in gravity? If so why?
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Personally, I do not believe in God, but I know that it is because I choose that belief. I am not some cold rationalist with mountains of evidence to prove my position. It's purely a matter of faith.
I do not believe in god, but I didn't "choose" that.
I, you, and every other person who ever lived was born an atheist.
I never chose to be otherwise.
There is a tremendous difference between blind faith and not choosing to buy into some idiotic belief system.
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What, your failure to understand basic logic?
Personally I figure I was born without having an opinion on much of anything.
Exactly. Were you born with a belief in god? No, then you were born an atheist.
Until you either come up with the question on your own or somebody presents the question to you, it'd be insane to say that you already have a stance.
You don't need a "stance" to be an atheist. You just need no belief in god. Like everybody is born and stays until they are brainwashed by a
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Why would you convert to Christianity just because he proved god existed? Heck, just proving god exists creates more questions, the most obvious being which of the thousands or millions of proposed gods is it?
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Now *that* would be a class action suit worth watching.
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Before you let your indignance burst your personality to bits, you might wan
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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 (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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Ah yes, we can't stand the noise they generate, so we generate noises that sound like what we think they might sound like.
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As many as you like provided you make the right assumptions
Re:the creationists will not like this (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Mod parent up... (Score:2)
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Newp, it does not. The wonderful thing about radioactive decay is that you don't need to know the "initial" amount; you can examine the remaining daughter isotopes and calculate the age of the object from there.
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How is ANYTHING you say any different than "it was magic"?
> you know, the observable stuff that you can apply the scientific method to?
Yeah! It's not like you can just look up and begin observing an infinite galaxy of stuff.
I'll be blunt - I don't think you have the faintest clue as to what the scientific method is. You like to pretend you do, you think you do, but you don't.
I'm guessing that it's be absolutely impossible for you to independenly move foward to discov
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They were looking for a ship inside an asteroid field but when they tried a specific rock it collapsed after they went inside.
As they looked around they saw reflections of the ship in various ways.
FYI, this is also the same episode which the finale of Enterprise used.
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a unique elemental composition?
Wow. You really don't know anything about the science behind this, do you?
Stars do not, for certain, have a unique elemental composition. They have a characteristic fingerprint of radiation which we interpret to correspond with various elemental compositions. The fact is that we've only recorded sets of photons and then drawn conclusions, some of them are well-founded but they are still interpreted conclusions nevertheless, about what elements those photons most likely were emitted from.
Recognizing that
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