James Webb Spots Our Twin at the Dawn of Time

[Ninurta]

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Maybe one day we'll discuss the Methuselah Star. Why try to see beyond the veil of the edge of the universe when we can see a star potentially older than the universe in our own back yard? But either way you go with it, the Methuselah Star promotes questions itself, whether it is or is not older than the universe.

I'm not sure how much stock I put into the aging of HD 140283 (the Methuselah Star).  It's age calculation is based on a quantum mechanics calculations used for stellar evolution.  So, it's a calculation based on an unproven theory describing a general concept which is then being used to describe the age of a specific object.  So, it's a calculation, based on a theory, which itself is based on a theory as if it were proven fact., 

Well, to be fair, the ages of ALL stars are estimates based upon theoretical observations. usually involving their "metallicity", or their proportion of elements heavier than helium ("metals").

The reason the Methuselah Star has such a tortured and derived age calculation is because clearly it cannot be older than the universe, and when it was thought that it was, then they had to re-calculate by jumping through hoops and creating a reason that it COULDN'T be older than the (theoretical) age of the universe. Since the Big Bang theory and cosmic background radiation sets the age of the universe at 13.8 billion years, they had to torture the calculations until the star was younger than that.

What they had to do was introduce the notion that the star's fuel was somehow "burning" faster than all other stars in the universe in order to make it younger.

In that effort, they have been only partly successful. The most recent age estimates I'm aware of (and I admit they are constantly changing as the physicists cast around trying to find reasons to push it lower) is 14.3 billion years, +/- 800,000 years. So the median age is still a half-billion years older than the universe, but in the lower 300,000 years of the age range, it could be the same age, or slightly younger, than the age of the universe as calculated from observations of the cosmic background radiation.

Currently, they are hanging their hats on that 300k year overlap, and ignoring the other 1.3 billion years of the range that do not overlap.

However, HD 140283 is apparently a Population II star, meaning that it is within the second generation of stars ever formed (for comparison, our Sun is a Population III star, the third generation, and is 4.5 billion years old by normal calculations), which means that there was an entire generation of stars before it which produced the few metals it contains. Is 300,000 years from the beginning of the universe really enough time for that first generation of stars to have been born and died, contributing the "metals" needed for the formation of the Population II stars?

The search for answers is ongoing.

I still believe that it's every bit as likely for a physicist to say "God spoke, and everything was" as it is for one to say "a tiny something exploded for no particular reason in nothing, and then everything was". Both solutions require a kind of magic.



ETA: Huh. YouTube has blocked me again over ad blockers which I don't have - my browser itself is blocking ads, so in order to see ads, I have to not browse the internet, which of course will prevent me from seeing the ads anyhow. Still, I can get to the videos in order for YouTube to admonish me over not wanting to get swarmed with ads for mail order brides and ED pills that I don't need either of, and I can then grab the URL of the video and post the URL here, and then I can watch the video ad-free.

The Big Bang theory is not the only thing in the world that makes no sense, apparently.

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