Talk:HD 140283

Embarrassing Observation - Star Older than Big Bang Models

Currently the article claims "having been created very shortly after the Big Bang" - but the reference is a blog article of unclear quality.

This article needs to be updated / corrected for this month's NASA announcement stating that this star "could be as old as 14.5 billion years (plus or minus 0.8 billion years), which at first glance would make it older than the universe's calculated age of about 13.8 billion years, an obvious dilemma. But earlier estimates from observations dating back to 2000 placed the star as old as 16 billion years."

The same article quotes the lead researcher "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," said Bond.

His quote of "14.5 billion" conflicts with the other citations, none of which directly quote the Bond team on the measurement.

I suggest removing the text "having been created very shortly after the Big Bang" because due to the ancient star's measurement's error bars barely reaching the oldest age allowed by Big Bang, there is an 89% probability the star is older than the standard Big Bang model and only an 11% probability that interpretations of the WMAP data supporting Big Bang's age is right.

Star was previously measured accurately

The article claims "Before Bond's team's studies, the star's distance had not been accurately measured." - but the reference is a blog article of unclear quality.

Which is why the claim is wrong.

NASA's press release explains "European Space Agency's Hipparcos satellite made a precise measurement of the star's parallax" some years ago.

It goes on to explain that the "new" distance to the star is essentially identical to the distance Hipparcos measured, it just has more accuracy; smaller error bars.

To leave the article as it is is wrong and an insult to the Hipparcos measurement, just as it would be an insult to the team who made the new measurement to say the same thing in a decade or so when the distance is measure with even higher accuracy. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 98.234.101.123 (talk) 03:53, 15 March 2013 (UTC)

That version of the article was a little too breathlessly cheerleading for the February 2013 result, I agree, and I think the recent (mid-May 2013) overhaul fixes that problem. But to characterize the claim as "wrong" veers too far in the other direction. The parallax from HIPPARCOS is, as you point out, identical with the HST/FGS result. What the later FGS parallax does accomplish is tighten the error bars up by about a factor of 4. That in turn constrains the stellar luminosity strongly enough that the age determination via stellar evolution/H-R diagram fit has uncertainties tight enough for the result to be interesting, which would not have been true with only the larger HIPPARCOS uncertainties. BSVulturis (talk) 15:59, 15 May 2013 (UTC)

We might have an older one on our hands

Article in Nature on a very low-iron star: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nature12990.html