Is This Star Older Than The Universe?
Scientists found a star that seems to be older than the entire universe. This star is commonly called Matuselah, but its real name is HD 140283. When astronomers analyzed data from Methuselah, they couldn’t believe their own eyes: the star seemed pretty much older than the universe.
How do explain that?
Going backwards, the Sun is a star created by processes that followed a big explosion: the Big Bang. We all know the Big Bang is where and when everything started. Therefore, to know when such an explosion happened in the past is to know how old is the entire universe.
Do we have an estimate for that age as well?
There are actually many ways to estimate the age of the universe. The most used one makes use of the so-called Hubble diagrams.
In short terms, everything we see in the universe is no more as we see it through our telescope, and this is because of a series of facts: the main reason is that light travel at a finite constant speed, c.
When a light ray is emitted by the surface of a star, it starts to travel and reaches us only after a period of time, that is actually the time light takes to go from there to here, the Earth (or, more precisely, from there to our telescope!).
Given this important informations, we can understand what a Hubble diagram is. Hubble’s incredible discovery was to have found a law that tells us the universe is expanding, and it does so by means of a constant, the so-called Hubble constant. But he also found that the so-called redshift – the displacement in lines spectra of stars due to the doppler effect – was correlated with the object’s distance from us.
This means that redshift information turns into distance information.
The constant that bounds v, the velocity, and d, the distance, has the inverse unit of time.
This means that, if we take the inverse of the Hubble constant, all we have is a value that represents somewhat a time quantity.
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