Friday 8 March 2013

The Methuselah Star

The Hubble Space Telescope was used in the discovery of a very interesting star right here in the Milky Way galaxy (see article Astronomers Find Ancient Star Methuselah Which Appears To Be Older Than The Universe). The problem is that it's estimated age, about 14.5 billion years old (maybe as old as 16 billion years), is considerably older than our best estimates for the age of the whole universe, which is about 13.8 billion years old...

I actually love this stuff. The idea of things so old and time so great just excites me and kicks my curiosity and imagination into overdrive.

However, I sometimes think that we're more than a little bit arrogant, throwing around concepts like dark matter, dark energy and inflation like they're signed sealed and delivered, when in fact they're nothing but complicated abstractions that help to explain serious flaws in the mathematics of our best theories. I'd be much happier if, when we talk about this stuff, we describe them as theories- good theories, and the best theories that we have- but still, for now, just theories, and not necessarily real stuff. At least not until someone shows us a beaker of dark matter in their lab, anyway...

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