By The Huffington Post News Editors
By: Mike Wall
Published: 03/07/2013 04:40 PM EST on SPACE.com
The oldest known star appears to be older than the universe itself, but a new study is helping to clear up this seeming paradox.
Previous research had estimated that the Milky Way galaxy’s so-called “Methuselah star” is up to 16 billion years old. That’s a problem, since most researchers agree that the Big Bang that created the universe occurred about 13.8 billion years ago.
Now a team of astronomers has derived a new, less nonsensical age for the Methuselah star, incorporating information about its distance, brightness, composition and structure.
“Put all of those ingredients together, and you get an age of 14.5 billion years, with a residual uncertainty that makes the star’s age compatible with the age of the universe,” study lead author Howard Bond, of Pennsylvania State University and the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, said in a statement. [Gallery: The Methuselah Star Revealed]
The uncertainty Bond refers to is plus or minus 800 million years, which means the star could actually be 13.7 billion years old — younger than the universe as it’s currently understood, though just barely.
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