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 the remnants of the earliest and oldest stars in the universe.
According to the study, the galaxy’s ancient star collections were formed when the galaxy was still young, and they have knowledge of the galaxy’s early stages of expansion and evolution.
This leads to the question: Which star is the oldest in the universe? And how old is it?
Keep reading to unravel the tiny thread of mystery surrounding our universe.
Our universe is unimaginably vast and mysterious. We have only explored about 5% of the seemingly endless universe.
In the universe we know, there are hundreds of billions of stars, each with its own 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 Methuselah, also known as HD 140283, a supergiant star.
Source: Star event
Methuselah is located in the constellation Libra, near the Ophiuchus border of the Milky Way galaxy and about 190 light-years from Earth. It has an apparent magnitude of 7.205.
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How old is the oldest star in the universe?
Methuselah is believed to be the oldest star in the entire known universe, forming more than 14 billion years ago. Its age makes it older than the universe itself.
Another mystery is added to the list of mysteries related to our universe.
The little giant is definitely old. It has very little iron and is mainly composed of hydrogen and helium. This composition indicates that the star must have formed when helium and hydrogen dominated the universe and before iron became common, since heavier elements only evolved when massive stars created them in their cores. they.
According to a study published in the Astrophysical Journal, the estimated age of a star depends not only on the amount of energy it produced at the time, but also on how it produced energy in the past. throughout its existence.
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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 both directions. The star may be as young as 13.6 billion years old, which is within the age of the universe, although seemingly at odds with the widely accepted age of the universe, estimated to be 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 universe, so it makes no difference (for this particular question) whether it’s older than the universe or not.
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Categories: Optical Illusion
Source: pagasa.edu.vn