The one of the Greatest Cosmic Puzzle: Astronomers Find Stars That Appear Older Than The Universe

Image source Google.

If you understand how stars work, you can observe the physical properties of each of them and extend its lifespan and know when it was born. As we age, stars undergo great changes: their radius, light, and temperature all grow as they burn through their fuel. But the lifespan of a star, in general, depends only on two properties born of it: its mass and its metallicity, the magnitude of the elements inside it, which are larger than the hydrogen and helium inside. The oldest stars we have found in the universe are almost the oldest, with 100% of the hydrogen and helium that make them up remaining from the Big Bang. They are over 13 billion years old, the oldest being 14.5 billion. And this is a big problem, because the universe is only 13.8 billion years old.

Image Source Google

You should not have a better star than the universe; This means that the star existed before the Big Bang! Yet we know - the source of the Big Bang universe - that all matter, energy, neutrinos, photons, antimatter, dark matter and even dark energy originated here. Everything in our observable universe came from that event, and everything we feel today belongs to that source. So the simple explanation that there are stars before the universe should be rejected.

Cosmic Epochs

It is even possible that the age of the universe is wrong for us! The way we reach that number is through an accurate measurement of the universe. Watching for complete sleep with symptoms, including:

• Density and temperature errors in the cosmic microwave background are saved from the Big Bang ,
• The clustering of stars and galaxies at present and going back billions of light years,
• Hubble expansion rate of the fabric of the universe,
• History of stellar formation and galaxy evolution,

And many other resources, we have come to a very consistent picture of the universe. It contains 68% dark energy, 27% dark matter, 4.9% ordinary matter, 0.1% neutrinos and 0.01% radiation and is 13.8 billion years old. Uncertainty over the number of ages is less than 100 million years, so while it is acceptable that the universe is slightly older or shorter, achieving up to 14.5 billion years is exceptionally impossible.

So this is only a reasonable possibility: maybe we can get the age of the stars wrong. We have observed millions of stars in detail at different stages in their life cycle. We know how and under what conditions stars form; We know when and how they ignite nuclear fusion; We know how long the various stages of a combination last and how effective they are; We know the lifetime and have identified the death of many different types of stars. In short, astronomy is a very strong science, especially when it comes to stars. In general, ancient stars are found to be smaller in mass (larger than our Sun), contain much less metallic matter (elements other than hydrogen or helium) and must exist before the Milky Way.

Most of them appear in spherical clusters, which have been confirmed to contain more than 12 billion stars, or in rare cases even 13 billion years. A generation ago, people agreed that these groups were between 14 and 16 billion years old, which created tension in accepted cosmological patterns, but a better understanding of stellar evolution brought these numbers back. As our observational capabilities improved we also developed more advanced methods: not only by measuring the carbon, oxygen or iron content of these stars, but also by using the radioactive decay enrichment of uranium and thorium, the elements formed in it. Together with the universe’s first supernova, we can date directly with many different stars.

Located around 4,140 light-years away in the galactic halo, SDSS J102915+172927 is an ancient star that contains just 1/20,000th the heavy elements the Sun possesses, and should be over 13 billion years old: one of the oldest in the Universe, similar to but even more metal-poor than HE 1523-0901.

 Image Source: https://medium.com

In 2007, we were able to measure the star HE 1523–0901, which made up 80% of the Sun's mass, containing only 0.1% of the Sun's iron, and was 13.2 billion years old by its radioactive element abundance. In 2015, the constellation of nine stars in the center of the Milky Way formed 13.5 billion years ago: exactly 300,000,000 years after the Big Bang and before the beginning of the Milky Way. Louis Howes, co-discoverer of these ancient relics, stated that "these stars formed before the Milky Way and formed the Milky Way around them." In fact, one of those nine stars is less than 0.001% of the Sun's iron; This is exactly the star and stellar population sections that the James Web Space Telescope will see when it launches in October 2018.

This is a Digitized Sky Survey image of the oldest star with a well-determined age in our galaxy... Image Source : https://hubblesite.org

But the most confusing star of all is HD 140283, unofficially nicknamed Methuselah Star. At just 190 light-years away, we can measure its brightness, surface temperature, and composition very accurately; We can see that it has further developed into a sub-stage and become a red giant. These pieces of information together allow us to obtain a well-defined value for stellar age, and the result is, to say the least: 14.46 billion years. Some other properties, such as the Sun's 0.4% iron content, indicate that it is very old, but not among the oldest stars. However, there is an uncertainty that is about 800 million years old, which is still at an awkward beginning and indicates a potential conflict between how old the stars are and how old the universe is.

The Milky Way, as we know it today, hasn't changed much in billions of years. But as the stars age, https://medium.com

Now, something we don’t know about today is a star in the past. It is born as a high-mass star, stitching off some outer layers, shortening the lifespan of the star. The star who distorted our perceptions after this day and replaced our massive element content is likely to realize some things later in life. Or we may have misunderstood the sub-stage of the stellar evolution of these old, less metallic wires. When we try and calculate the age of ancient stars, these are potential sources of unknown (and in some cases, unknowing) errors.

But if we get this age right, there may be a problem. You should not have a star in our universe which is older than the universe. Something in our estimates for the age of some of these stars is wrong, something is wrong in our estimates for the age of the universe, or something we don’t even consider closed. 

While infrared surveys are often use to image dusty objects, peering inside, they're also incredibly... Image Source: https://medium.com/

Conclusion However, this is an important and highly valuable position for the scientist. The stars should put a lower limit on the age of the universe; The universe must be big in itself. This is not what we are looking at with absolute certainty, creating beautiful tension that can prove to be an omen for extraordinary scientific progress. We learn new things about stars and how they live, grow and die; We learn something new about the age of the universe; Or is there a third factor to this misunderstanding, the possibility of improving our scientific understanding of the universe. In the end, it's the biggest situation any interested person can expect to find himself. The impossibility seems to be proven to be even more valuable: the opportunity to push our knowledge on how the universe operates within unknown boundaries.