The globular star cluster M92, shown here in an image from the Hubble Space Telescope, appears to be about 13.8 billion years old — the same age as the universe.ESA/Hubble, NASA, Gilles Chapdelaine
Posted on 06/24/2023 7:14:19 AM PDT by SunkenCiv
This isn't the first time astronomers have measured M92's age, but previous estimates relied on just one synthetic collection of stars. Comparing thousands of them reduced the uncertainty introduced by the assumptions baked into each one. The new technique reduced the uncertainty of the cluster age by about 50 percent, Ying says. The team found the cluster is 13.8 billion years old, give or take 750 million years. That's strikingly close to the best estimate of the age of the universe: a smidge over 13.8 billion years, plus or minus 24 million years, according to the Planck satellite's measurement of the first light emitted after the Big Bang (SN: 12/20/13).
The age of clusters like M92 is important partly because of a rising tension over how fast the universe is growing. Astronomers have known since the 1990s that the universe is expanding at an ever-increasing rate, thanks to a mysterious substance dubbed dark energy (SN: 8/25/22). But recent measurements of the rate of that expansion, a figure called the Hubble constant, disagree with each other (SN: 7/30/19).
One way around that tension is to accept a different age for the universe, says cosmologist and study coauthor Mike Boylan-Kolchin of the University of Texas at Austin...
That's where M92 comes in. Before spacecraft measured the cosmos' earliest light, globular cluster ages were the best way to place limits on the age of the universe. That practice had fallen out of fashion for a while, says cosmologist Wendy Freedman of the University of Chicago, who was not involved in the new work.
But improvements in computing, theory, and measurements of the distances to clusters like M92 make it worth trying again.
(Excerpt) Read more at sciencenews.org ...
The globular star cluster M92, shown here in an image from the Hubble Space Telescope, appears to be about 13.8 billion years old — the same age as the universe.ESA/Hubble, NASA, Gilles Chapdelaine
Almost as old as Biden or Sanders
The late Helen Thomas had chunks of this star cluster in her stool.
There’s a Keith Edwards joke in there too, but I’ll let someone else make it
The star “cluster” may be that old, but wouldn’t any actual stars be less than that old (or at least just about burned out by now)?
I was going to make a serious comment, then I read yours. Can’t get the visual out of my head. Then I took it further and said to myself, that sounds like a candy bar. And by God, it is!
More mumbo jumbo space crap. Centuries ago and millenniums away.
And yet a deep sea sub can implode in 1 millisecond.
No! The (remaining) stars in the cluster are white dwarfs and other types that are very long lived. There were likely larger shorter lived stars in the cluster a very long time ago.
Ah. Thanks.
Those two statements don’t actually conflict.
Also, I believe that the universe came into existence in a millisecond or so. It’s since gotten older.
Burkhard Heim’s cosmology explains this by having a googolplex of years where the universe was dark and void. This development was organized in higher dimensions so that when the quantum of space time got small enough and the size of the universe got large enough, God said “let there be light” and the was light all over the universe. Matter was then instantiated all over the universe in the same form as it appears today.
And a Keith Richards joke too. ;^)
Heck yeah! Never adjust your weak assumptions; keep them. Just move the goalpost.
Notice how they keep “moving the goalposts”—making the universe older and older.
It is getting older faster than I am...
;-)
Well I blew that one :-)
What a coincidence! Our galaxy just happens to be at the center of the expanding universe!
Didn’t we make this mistake once before?
Feed me-—
The Astronomers
How could something as old as the universe be so close to us? Was Hubbles idea incomplete? How much, presented as fact, is not?
Waiting for De Grasse Tyson, Dawkins, Krauss, Greene, Nye to explain this.
The big bang was the installation procedure for spacetime, which is a construct. Rather than the beginning of everything. Spacetime does not emerge unbidden from quantum particle physics any more than does a football stadium. Both are possible, of course, but only as a result of intelligence and intention.
If the canvas of spacetime is constructed, it follows that everything painted onto spacetime is likewise. Space, energy, time, matter, us.
“The Hubble tension itself is a really challenging nut to crack,” Freedman says. This measurement alone isn’t precise enough to settle the debate. But “the more kinds of constraints we have, the better,” she says. “It’s showing a way for the future.”I'm just gonna let that one percolate on its own...
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