hey 42 here tued away in the constellation Libra 190 light years from Earth is a stellar anomaly an ancient mystery so baffling get Force scientists to question everything they thought they knew about our universe at first glance this star officially known as HD 140283 doesn't look particularly special it isn't unusually large or freakishly bright and it generally conforms to widely accepted models of Stellar Evol ution but in the year 2000s this apparently unassuming star sent the entire scientific world into turmoil astronomers had long suspected that HD 14283 was old thanks to its unusual composition more on that later in the video but when they first attempted to figure out exactly how old the number they came up with was unexpected because hd40 283 wasn't just old it was impossibly ancient and I'm not using the word impossible for effect here according to the astronomer's careful calculations this strange star was 16 billion years old or to put that another way it was 2 billion years older than the universe itself this is the story of the star that should shouldn't exist this is the story of HG 140283 better known as the meusa star now people think that performing at the highest level requires you to be stressed but that's just not true 5 years ago magic mind set out to create a drink that can consistently get you to 100% mental performance without any of the downsides such as over caffeination Jitters and anxiety you see Magic Man contains adaptogens such as ashwaganda that helps combat stress it also contains organic Lion's main mushroom to boost your everyday cognitive power at the start of this year I tried magic mind for the first time and I found it so effective that I've continued to take it every day for the past few months magic mind is different from others because it's 100% safe all the ingredients are third party tested and sourced from the best suppliers and it's not a quick fix magic M believes mental performance should be tackled over the the long term some of their ingredients can take 3 to 4 days to reach their full effect after my first week trying it I still remember that feeling of increased attention each day I continue to take it magic mind is Doctor validated it's created with a scientific Advisory Board of doctors and medical research and it was developed over 10 years to create the perfect formula the matchet in this is the highest possible grade grown in Japan and their own mushrooms are grown organically in California so go to www. mic. ch for the next 10 days or 20% off a one-time purchase don't miss out and a big thanks to Magic mind for sponsoring this video the early Universe was a very different place to the fancy schmancy modern one we all live in today after the big bang the entirety of existence was basically just one giant hot soup of protons neutrons and electrons after a few hundred thousand years things had cooled down enough for the first atoms to form these atoms were almost exclusively hydrogen and helium and around 150 to 200 million years after the big bang these enterprising young particles got together to form the very first stars that must have been the bit where God said let there be light somewhat confusingly these very first generation of stars are known to astronomers as population free stars we've never directly observed any of them so scientists aren't 100% sure what they look like we know they must have been made almost exclusively of primordial hydrogen and helium because that's literally all there was and the general consensus is that they were very large 60 to 300 times more massive than the sun oh and extremely hot and luminous somewhat counterintuitively larger stars have shorter lifespans than smaller ones that's because the larger the star the stronger the gravitational forces it creates stronger gravitational forces means higher core temperatures and higher core temperatures increase the rate at which the nuclear reactions occur even though larger stars have correspondingly larger fuel supplies than smaller ones they use that fuel up so quickly that they are much shorter LIF because population free stars were so huge probably they didn't last very long exhausting their fuel supplies in as little as a few hundred million years before blowing themselves to bits in the universe's first Supernova these colossal Stellar explosions spewed the inage of these population free stars back out into the universe releasing the very first heavy Elements which had been created by a process called nucleo symphysis both in the Stars course and during the supern noi themselves the new generation of stars that formed from the guts of the population fre stars are imaginatively called population two stars and unlike their parents they contain some heavy elements though in much lower quantities than younger population one stars like our sun scientists first realized that HD 140283 was old back in the ' 50s when they used spectroscopic analysis to determine that that it contains extremely low levels of heavy elements for example it contains just 0.
4% of the amount of iron found in the Sun that tells us that HD 140283 is a very old star formed before heavy elements like iron were abundant in the universe but it wasn't until relatively recently that scientists were able to estimate just how old using data gathered by the European space agency's haaka satellite They concluded that HD 4283 has existed for 16 billion years a full 2 billion years longer than well existence itself news that astronomers had found a star that appeared to be older than the universe quickly made headlines around the world if their findings were correct they called into question our entire understanding of the cosmos by the turn of the Millennium and after many decades of fierce debate The Big Bang Theory had finally won over almost the entire scientific community and firmly established itself as the origin story of our universe but if HD 140283 really was as old as it appeared to be it was casty in proof that we'd gotten something badly wrong some scientists were questioning whether it validated The Big Bang Theory entirely so hd140 to great free was kind of a big deal a big deal but also a bit of a mouthful and so the Press soon came up with a catchier more print friendly nickname for this Celestial odity from that moment onwards it would become known as the meusa star in case you've skyed off Bible School growing up Methuselah son of Enoch was the longest living man in the Bible according to the Book of Genesis he reached the grand old age of 969 before dying not long before the arrival of the great flood okay so what exactly was going on here how is it even possible for a Star to be older than the universe itself well the short answer is of course that it isn't possible and that could only mean one thing somebody somewhere had really really boogered something up either the meusa star was younger than it appeared or the universe was older but which one was it well the answer is actually quite a lot more complicated than you might think according to our current best estimates the universe we all call home is about 13. 8 billion years old but whilst that figure is often taken to be an immutable fact unless you get your science from alternative sources the truth is that the currently accepted age of our universe is still just an estimate and one that not everyone in the scientific Community agrees with earlier this year the James web telescope took this image this tiny blob right here is a Galaxy called Jade GS z140 sitting a cool 33. 6 billion light years away from Earth it is the most distant object we've ever observed thanks to the frankly absurd scale of our universe and the comparatively sluggish pace of light moving through it when we look at Jade's GS z140 we see it not as it looks today but as it appeared just 290 million years after the big bank and that appearance is not at all what astronomers were expecting the Galaxy is relatively large about 1,600 light years across and very luminous shining with the light of hundreds of millions of suns based on what we think we know about the universe the formation of a galaxy this large simply shouldn't have been possible so soon after the big bang so what does that mean well some astronomers believe the universe may actually be significantly older than we previously thought in fact a 2023 study made Headlines by concluding that the universe is almost twice as old as the current estimate at around 26.
7 billion years so is the methusa star further evidence that the universe is much older than we thought well not necessarily whilst it's true that the age of the universe is still debated the figure I mentioned earlier 13. 8 billion years has got something very important going for it we can confirm it in several different ways one of those ways is by studying the cosmic microwave background to determine the initial conditions in the universe and how it evolved from there and another is to use Hubble's Law to rewind the expansion of the universe to figure out when that expansion first began crucially these unrelated methods both give us strikingly similar numbers for the age of the universe for that reason the vast majority of the scientific Community is in agreement that the universe is indeed 13. 8 billion years old we aren't completely sure but we're pretty darn close so we were pretty confident about the age of the universe we must have got the age of the meusel star wrong right well in 2013 that's exactly what a team of astronomers from Penn State University attempted to find out calculating the age of a single star is a surprisingly difficult thing to do the age of the universe can be verified using various factors like the cosmic microwave background and Hubble's Law but when it comes to dating single stars all on their Lonesome there are no other factors all we have to go on is what we can observe of the star to today there are several different ways to calculate the age of a star but all of them have something in common they require accurate data about the star in question things like its Luminosity distance from Earth mass and composition scientists can then plug those parameters into Stellar evolutionary models to predict the life cycle of the star and ultimately estimate its age if the models and data used are perfect the calculated age of the star will will be perfect too but any errors will impact the accuracy of the result so the most obvious place for the Penn State team to start was to confirm whether or not the observational data used to calculate the age of the meus star was accurate in the first place spoiler alert it wasn't between 2003 and 2011 the legendary Hubble Space Telescope made almost a dozen different sets of observations of the meus star using this new more accurate data and a few tweaks to the Stellar evolutionary model used the Penn State University team were able to calculate a more accurate estimate for the age of the star the good news was that the new number was lower than the one from the previous study the not so good news was that the figure they came up with 14.
46 billion years was still older than the age of the universe there was a silver lining though the residual uncertainty of the new age that was calculated was 0. 8 billion years in other words if the true age of the mausel star happens to fall towards the lower end of the updated estimate it didn't clash with the accepted age of the universe but it still wasn't ideal even though the new results hinted that the muus star might not spell the end of reality as we know it after all it still clearly demonstrated that we were guessing something somewhere very wrong either the data we had on the star still wasn't correct the Stellar evolutionary models didn't work or we needed to take another look at our estimate for the age of the universe in other words it was back to the drawing board but over the last decade there have been several more studies of this mysterious star each one using better data and more accurate models than the last in an attempt to clear this mess up once and for all a paper published in 2014 nudged the estim ated age of the star down to 14. 27 billion years and in 2021 that figure was brought all the way down to 12 billion years comfortably younger than the universe in some ways it might sound like a bit of an anticlimax that this star that breaks the universe is actually just a really old star that if anything actually kind of supports our current cosmological model but the truth is the mausa star is still one of the most fascinating objects in the cosmos it may not have forced us to re-evaluate our understanding of the universe but it still helped us to shape it back in 1951 the muusa star well just plain old HD 140283 as it was known back then was the first star ever detected with a much lower heavy element content than we find in the Sun and that observation was to clue that astronomers like Fred Hy needed to First realize that elements heavier than helium are made inside stars the meus star is also a good reminder that we still have a lot to learn about our universe our understanding of the cosmos has come an incredibly long way in a remarkably short space of time but much of what we think we know is based on certain assumptions it's inevitable that some of those assumptions will turn out to be wrong which means a lot of science textbooks will need to be updated in the decades and centuries ahead that's all a part of progress whatever the precise age of the mausa star turns out to be so far as we know this ancient star was born before the formation of the Milky Way itself and yet despite its incredible age believe it or not it's still just a baby at the moment it's classified as a subgiant that's what our son will become in about 5 billion years from now but eventually the meusa will exhaust all of its Fuel and shed its outer layer of gas becoming a kind of Stellar Remnant known as a white dwarf at that point it will no longer be fusing atoms in its core but it will continue to shine faintly for about 10 trillion years until all its residual heat has been radiated out into space and it becomes a black dwarf the meusa star may be incredibly ancient by today's standards but it has only lived about 0.
