Astronomers spot one of the oldest stars – BGR

Our solar system is incredibly old by human standards. The sun, sitting in the center, would be a little over 4.6 billion years old, which is an almost unfathomable weather for you and me. But it's not so impressive when it comes to the stars.

A new study of a given star in our own galaxy, the Milky Way, reveals that it is much older than everyone thought. In fact, he is old enough for our star to look like a youngster by comparison. The elderly star calls (deep breath) 2MASS J18082002-5104378 B, and what she misses in a flashy name, she does more than compensate with age. Astronomers now believe that it is an incredible age of 13.5 billion years.

2MASS J18 … you know what? Let's just call it "the old star" for the moment. The Old Star has lost its age due to its incredibly low mbad and metal content. Researchers believe that new stars tend to have very high metallicity, but the metal content of the old star is incredibly low. It is also very small and weighs only about 1/10 of the mbad of our own sun.

"We have never discovered a star of such a low mbad, made up of so few grams of metals," said astrophysicist Andrew Casey, co-author of the study published in The astrophysical journal, told ScienceAlert. "This discovery tells us that the very first stars of the Universe were not necessarily all mbadive stars who had died long ago. These ancient stars could form very small amounts of material, which means that some of these relics dating back to shortly after the Big Bang could still exist today.

So how did the star manage to stay alive for so long? Well, its small size actually plays in its favor because the very big stars tend to burn their fuel much faster than the very small ones. The Old Star only exceeds the known mbad limit to facilitate the combustion of hydrogen; it consumes its fuel very slowly over billions of years.

Its small size and low light made it difficult to spot, and the team suggests there could be many other very old stars sitting around the Milky Way that have gone undetected because we just can not get them. see as well.

Image Source: NASA