The James Webb Telescope (JWST) was used by a team of Canadian astronomers to locate the most distant globular clusters ever discovered. Globular clusters are dense collections of millions of stars that may represent remains of the first and oldest stars in the cosmos.
According to the research, the galaxy’s ancient collections of stars were formed when the galaxy was still young and have knowledge of the early phases of the galaxy’s expansion and evolution.
This leads to the question: What is the oldest star in the universe? And how old are you?
Read on to unravel the little thread of mystery that surrounds our universe.
Our universe is vast beyond imagination and mysterious. We have only explored about 5% of the seemingly infinite universe.
In our known universe there are hundreds of billions of stars, each with its own unique characteristics. Some are so massive that they are larger than entire galaxies, some are tiny, and some are even invisible. And some are even older than life.
The oldest star in the known universe is the star Methuselah, also known as HD 140283, a subgiant star.
Source: Star Data
Methuselah is located in the constellation Libra, near the Ophiuchus edge of the Milky Way and about 190 light years from Earth. It has an apparent magnitude of 7.205.
Read also | What are stars? How are they born and how do they die?
How old is the oldest star in the universe?
Methuselah is believed to be the oldest star in the entire known universe, having formed more than 14 billion years ago. Its age makes it older than the universe itself.
Another mystery added to the list of those involving our universe.
The subgiant is definitely old. It has very little iron and is composed mainly of hydrogen and helium. This composition indicated that the star must have formed when helium and hydrogen predominated in the cosmos and before iron became ubiquitous, since heavier elements only developed when massive stars generated them in their cores.
According to a study published in Astrophysical Journal Letters, the estimated age of a star depends not only on how much energy it generates at that moment but also on how it has generated it throughout its existence.
Read also | What are wormholes, the hypothetical entities that can allow time travel?
Methuselah’s metallicity was carefully measured and the star’s age was determined to be 14.46 billion years, with an error of 800 million years in either direction. The star could be as little as 13.6 billion years old, which is within the age of the universe, despite the apparent conflict with the widely accepted age of the universe, which is estimated at 13.77 billion years. It may also be significantly older than the universe, at 15.3 billion years old.
Methuselah is still the oldest star in the cosmos, so it doesn’t matter (with respect to this particular question) whether or not it is older than the universe.
Read also | Do you know: When will the sun die?
Categories: Optical Illusion
Source: ptivs2.edu.vn