The info about Methuselah Star (also designated as HD 140283, BD−10 4149, GJ 1195, HIP 76976, SAO 159459) being older than the Universe itself seems to appear everywhere on the internet these days.
We all know that our Universe is 13.799 ± 0.021 billion years old, calculated from the Big Bang Singularity to our present day. For many decades it was suggested that Methuselah Star would be 16 billion years old. Now it stands at around 14.4 billion years old (± 800 million years), which is still an issue, even if we consider it to be 13.6 billion years old. The high-velocity star is only 190.1 light years away from Earth and it was calculated to burn at an extremely low rate and to be very low in metals, hence its paradoxical age.
So is the Methuselah Star older than the Universe? Very unlikely! Recent studies have shown that the star has a relatively high oxygen to iron ratio which brings HD 140283’s age down by a couple of hundreds of millions of years. Why is metal so important? The first generation stars were deprived of any metals in their composition as only a Supernova explosion can produce heavy elements such as iron. After the Supernova explosions of the first generation stars, the gas in the Universe needed some time to cool in order to form a second generation of stars. Methuselah Star has iron in its composition, therefore it cannot be a first generation star, not to mention that the first stars were generally huge (due to the large amounts of hydrogen gas in the Universe), Methuselah Star is not, since it’s only 3 times larger than our Sun, a yellow dwarf.
There is still a lot of uncertainty about Methuselah Star’s age, not to mention that to this day no one knows for sure how old it really is. Feel free to leave your thoughts and opinions about the star’s age in the comment section. I would love to hear your input on this cosmic paradox. – Roman Alexander



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