What is the oldest star ever seen?

As NASA announced, a new paper published in Nature reports that Hubble has spotted a star that is a staggering 12.9 billion years old, meaning it existed when the universe was only 7% of its current age.
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What is the oldest star seen?

Meanwhile, estimates of the age of HD 140283, the star known as Methuselah, have sparked controversy. Early estimates from observations made in 2000 put it at 16 billion years old, according to NASA (opens in new tab). That would have made it older than the universe, which is around 13.8 billion years old.
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What is the oldest star older than the universe?

Since HD 140283 is a Population II star, it is older. In fact, it is the oldest star with a well-determined age. Because of this, astronomers colloquially call the star “the Methuselah star.” Initial estimates of its age were in excess of 14 billion years.
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What is the oldest star found by James Webb?

The James Webb Space Telescope has captured a glimpse of Earendel, the oldest and most distant star ever observed that was first discovered by the Hubble Space Telescope earlier this year.
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Is there really a star older than the universe?

The star HD 140283 is a subgiant star with an estimated age of 14.46 billion years. That might raise an eyebrow or two for those of you who remember that the age of the universe is estimated as 13.77 billion years.
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The Oldest Star in the Universe



What came before the universe?

In the beginning, there was an infinitely dense, tiny ball of matter. Then, it all went bang, giving rise to the atoms, molecules, stars and galaxies we see today. Or at least, that's what we've been told by physicists for the past several decades.
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What is outside the universe?

By definition, the universe is everything, so there is nothing external to it for it to expand into.
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What is the oldest galaxy we can see?

Poring over some of the earliest science observations the telescope took, they found a galaxy that stood out from the rest. Named GLASS-z13, this appears to be the oldest galaxy we've ever seen. GLASS-z13 in JWST NIRCam (Naidu et al. 2022).
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What is the oldest thing in the universe?

They made observations via the European Space Agency's (ESA) (opens in new tab) Hipparcos satellite and estimated that HD140283 — or Methuselah as it's commonly known — was a staggering 16 billion years old.
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How far into the past can James Webb see?

Besides looking farther across space than any observatory before it, the James Webb Space Telescope has another trick up its mirrors: It can look further back in time than any other telescope, observing distant stars and galaxies as they appeared 13.5 billion years ago, not long after the beginning of the universe as ...
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How long has a star been dead?

These stars are usually no more than about 10,000 light years away, so the light we see left them about 10,000 years ago. Most stars will "live" for somewhere in the neighborhood of 1 billion years, so the odds are low that any particular star died during the past 10,000 years.
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What is the youngest thing in the universe?

GN-z11 is the youngest and most distant galaxy scientists have observed. This video zooms to its location, some 32 billion light-years away.
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What is the star that will explode in 2022?

Betelgeuse is the nearest red supergiant star to Earth. Someday it'll explode as a supernova, but when? Just a few years ago, in late 2019, Betelgeuse sparked excitement around the world when it began dimming noticeably. The strange dimming of Betelgeuse caused some to believe the big event was close at hand.
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What is the rarest thing in the universe?

Only 1-in-10,000 galaxies fall into the rarest category of all: ring galaxies. With a dense core consisting of old stars, and a circular or elliptical ring consisting of bright, blue, young stars, the first ring was only discovered in 1950: Hoag's object.
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What is the oldest human made thing?

And, sure enough, Potts and Plummer soon unearthed a mesmerizing stone tool approximately two million years old. On loan from the Kenyan government since 2011, this stone, known as the Kanjera tool after the site where it lay buried, is the oldest human-made object in any Smithsonian collection.
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What is the oldest known item on Earth?

Ancient grains discovered in Australian meteorite reveal 'baby boom' in star formation. Scientists with the University of Chicago and Field Museum have discovered stardust that formed 5 to 7 billion years ago—the oldest solid material ever found on Earth.
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Why can't we see a 15 billion year old galaxy?

Answer and Explanation: Because the universe is estimated to be less than 14 billion years old, conventional wisdom would indicate that we can't see a galaxy 15 billion light-years away because, if anything exists 15 billion light-years away at all, its light hasn't had enough time to reach us.
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What is the closest star to universe?

Distance Information

Proxima Centauri, the closest star to our own, is still 40,208,000,000,000 km away. (Or about 268,770 AU.) When we talk about the distances to the stars, we no longer use the AU, or Astronomical Unit; commonly, the light year is used.
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What is the farthest star ever discovered?

James Webb Space Telescope glimpses Earendel, the most distant star known in the universe. The star's discovery by the Hubble Space Telescope was only announced earlier this year.
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Who created the universe?

Many religious persons, including many scientists, hold that God created the universe and the various processes driving physical and biological evolution and that these processes then resulted in the creation of galaxies, our solar system, and life on Earth.
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How will the universe end?

Eventually, the entire contents of the universe will be crushed together into an impossibly tiny space – a singularity, like a reverse Big Bang. Different scientists give different estimates of when this contraction phase might begin. It could be billions of years away yet.
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How many dimensions exist?

The world as we know it has three dimensions of space—length, width and depth—and one dimension of time. But there's the mind-bending possibility that many more dimensions exist out there. According to string theory, one of the leading physics model of the last half century, the universe operates with 10 dimensions.
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Does space go on forever?

The observable universe is finite in that it hasn't existed forever. It extends 46 billion light years in every direction from us. (While our universe is 13.8 billion years old, the observable universe reaches further since the universe is expanding). The observable universe is centred on us.
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How did the world start from nothing?

The Big Bang theory says that the universe came into being from a single, unimaginably hot and dense point (aka, a singularity) more than 13 billion years ago. It didn't occur in an already existing space. Rather, it initiated the expansion—and cooling—of space itself.
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What was Earth before?

In Earth's Beginning

At its beginning, Earth was unrecognizable from its modern form. At first, it was extremely hot, to the point that the planet likely consisted almost entirely of molten magma. Over the course of a few hundred million years, the planet began to cool and oceans of liquid water formed.
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