In 1912, the Mount Weir telescope in California, USA, discovered a rather peculiar star, numbered: HD140283, whose distance is about 190 light years, and it is strange because it is very fast, reaching a speed of 1.3 million kilometers per hour.
The Sun, which is also a star, orbits the Milky Way at about half the speed of 720,000 km/h. However, when calculating its age, an even stranger thing was discovered, and that was the discovery that the star was very old, reaching an age of 18 billion years.
At that time, there was no Big Bang theory, and mankind's exploration of the universe had not yet begun. In the perception of people at that time, the universe was an infinitely ancient space, and there was no concept of the age of the universe. Therefore, the 18 billion year old star was also an acceptable result at that time.
Since HD140283 was the oldest star discovered at that time, it was named after the longest-lived person in Western records, and finally named it Methuselah, which is like if we found the oldest star and named it after the longest-lived person in China, it must be Pengzu Star.
If there is no latter thing, then the galaxies and stars of the universe will be safe and sound, and they will all orbit each other, but the appearance of one person breaks the rare tranquility in the universe and begins a protracted debate. This man is Edwin Hubble, and because of his appearance, Methuselah is a little out of place in this universe, and some is not like the stars of this universe.
The Big Bang theory proposes that Methuselah is older than the age of the universe
In 1922, the American astronomer Hubble began to observe redshifts in the universe, and in 1929 he summarized these findings by concluding that, regardless of the direction, distant galaxies are rapidly moving away from us (redshift), while galaxies moving in and out are approaching us (blueshift). This means that the universe is constantly expanding.
If we extrapolate from this phenomenon, then at some point in the universe between 100 and 20 billion years, they should all be gathered in the same place. Because the Big Bang theory was so shocking at the time, Hubble's last layer of window paper did not pierce it, but only hinted that the universe should have originated in a Big Bang.
When Einstein heard about this, he was very surprised and went to the Wilson Observatory where Hubble worked, accompanied by Hubble himself. Einstein admitted the error of his previous research and affirmed the correctness of Hubble's conclusion.
In 1946, American astrophysicists, on the basis of Hubble, formally put forward the Big Bang theory, believing that the universe was an infinitesimal singularity before, but the mass was infinite, and finally exploded 14 billion years ago, spreading everywhere, and forming today's universe.
Later, according to the residual heat left over from the cosmic microwave background radiation, through the fluctuation of its temperature and density, it was finally estimated that the age of the universe was 13.799 ± 0.21 billion years, which is now said to be 13.8 billion years old.
After the Big Bang theory was proposed, it was too shocking for people to accept this theory for a while, but in the observation of the universe by many astrophysicists, it was found that the laws of the universe were also in line with the Big Bang theory, and then the Big Bang theory also became the mainstream view of the formation of the universe, and the age of the universe of 13.8 billion years was determined.
But after the age of the universe is determined, then Methuselah, with its age of 18 billion years, is very out of place, because this is a paradox, before the Big Bang, it was impossible to give birth to a star, but the age of this star is older than the age of the universe.
At this time, the CPU of the brains of the original scientists was burned, so at least one of the Big Bang theories and the age of Methuselah is wrong.
Either the age of Methuselah was incorrectly calculated, or the Big Bang theory was wrong and it was impossible for both to exist at the same time. Just like a person who cannot be older than his grandfather's age, if it exists, either the person's age is fake, or his grandfather is fake.
Since scientists at the time accepted the Big Bang theory, there was only one possibility, and that was that there was a problem with the estimation of the age of Methuselah.
So how is the age of the star calculated, and why does the figure 18 billion arrive at that is larger than the age of the universe?
How can the age of Methuselah be solved?
Although a star is a celestial body, it cannot escape a law, that is, there is life and there is death. And the process between birth and death is the process of star evolution. The different points in time of evolution are the different age stages of stars.
In the process of star evolution, its spectrum, brightness, color and rotation speed will show different characteristics, and then based on a large amount of observation data and a series of complex calculations, the age of the star can be determined.
After the discovery of Methuselah, from 1912 to 2000, for nearly a century, people have not solved the problem of the age of Methuselah, that is, in this century, its age is 18 billion years.
This was due to the observation instruments of the time, and on the other hand, there was no more precise calculation method to determine the exact age of Methuselah.
Although the Big Bang theory was in full swing, people seem to have selectively forgotten the existence of Methuselah, and as long as it exists, it is like a thorn in the hearts of cosmologists.
However, the question of the age of Methuselah is an insurmountable hurdle that must be resolved, otherwise the research based on the Big Bang theory will always be flawed.
In 2000, when human observation equipment and computing methods had advanced a century ago, the European Astronomical Office decided to conduct a detailed observation of Methuselah in order to calculate its exact age, and after a long period of speculation and analysis, it was finally determined that the age of Methuselah was wrong, not 18 billion years old, but 16 billion years old.
Although the age of Methuselah is reduced by 2 billion years, it is not very significant, because it has not passed the threshold of 13.8 billion years, and this age paradox still exists.
More than a decade later, astronomer Howard Bond and his team at the University of Pennsylvania decided to try again to see if Kan could pinpoint the age of Methuselah.
He carefully combed through all the stellar data of the Hubble Space Telescope from 2003 to 2011, 8 years, compared with the slight differences between them, and finally they came to the conclusion that the age of Methuselah is not 16 billion years old, but about 14.5 billion years old, which is 1.5 billion years less than the data measured in 2000.
But as more than ten years ago, there was no threshold of 13.8 billion years of cosmic age, but in Howard's view, the number of 14.5 billion years does not conflict with the age of the universe, and in his opinion, it is normal to have an error of plus or minus 800 million years, which is completely in line with the lower limit of the age of Methuselah after the birth of the universe.
However, his statement has been questioned by many astrophysicists, the most representative of which is Robert Matthews, a physicist at the University of Birmingham in the United Kingdom, whose meaning is very clear, there is an error in the age of the universe, and the actual age of the universe is smaller than 13.8 billion years, taking the upper limit of 13.8 billion years.
The actual age of Methuselah is estimated to be about 8 years below the estimate, and it is very unreasonable to subtract about 8 years to its lowest limit. It's like one person has 140 million, and the other person has 50 million, and after rounding, it becomes 100 million, which means that two people are the same, but the actual situation is about 3 times different.
Therefore, in Matthews's view, Howard's claim that the 14.5 billion years of Methuselah is in line with the 13.8 billion years of the universe is completely absurd and not a satisfactory result.
When there was an endless debate about the age of Methuselah, who knew that the question of the age of the universe had gone wrong again, and it was a wave of unsettled and wave after wave.
If there is a problem with the age of the universe, the age of Methuselah will be even more embarrassing
Long after the Big Bang theory was proposed, the age of the universe was estimated to be about 13.8 billion years, but at a cosmologists' conference in 2019.
The estimate that the age of the universe is 13.8 billion years has been questioned, and this time it is none other than Adam Rees, the 2011 Nobel laureate in physics, whose main achievement is the discovery in 1998 that dark energy accelerates the expansion of the universe.
According to Rees's conclusion, since the universe is expanding at an accelerated rate, rather than at a deceleration, the actual age of the universe is very incorrect, that is, the actual age of the universe may not be 13.8 billion years old, but may be less than a few hundred million years to more than a billion years.
In fact, astronomers have long questioned the age of the universe, and the observations of the Hubble Space Telescope at the time were different from those of the microwave background radiation observations.
There is no problem with the data for both of them, but the result is that the universe expands at different rates, which is also known as the "Weber tension", which also incorrectly affects the age of the universe due to the different expansion rates.
Earlier, scientists thought that the error of the Hubble Space Telescope might be too large, after all, it was launched in 1990, and the level of science and technology at that time was not very high, so it is reasonable to have a certain error.
However, with the launch of the Webb Space Telescope into deep space in 2021, it was expected that the data taken by Webb would solve this problem, but the data transmitted back by Webb not only did not eliminate the problem, but also confirmed the correctness of the original data from the Hubble Telescope.
Then, there is a great deal of controversy about the age of the universe, which may be younger than it is today, and the question of the age of Methuselah will be even more awkward.
As long as it exists, the Big Bang theory will be stuck like a thorn and will never be flawed.
Then one of the ages of the universe, the Big Bang theory, and the age of Methuselah, must be wrong. Robert Matthews once expressed his own views on this issue, and he was more inclined to the Big Bang theory to be problematic, compared with the age of the universe, it is simpler to observe a star 190 light-years away, and the data is more accurate, while observing the universe and estimating the age of the universe will be much more complicated. Is the Big Bang theory really wrong?
Which one do you support more for the 13.8 billion-year-old universe or the 14.5 billion-year-old planet Methuselah?