Methuselah is older than the universe? Are we mistaken?

Is there anything in the universe that is older than the universe? This is of course impossible, because all the existing matter in the universe was gradually formed after the birth of the universe.

That is to say, the age of any matter in the universe cannot be greater than 13.82 billion years, because according to current calculations, the age of the universe is about 13.82 billion years. How is the age of the universe calculated? The universe did not exist from the beginning. Before the birth of the universe, it was a singularity with infinite density and infinitely small volume. Because some unknown balance was broken, the singularity exploded, and matter gushed out in an instant, and time, space and matter were born. This is the "Big Bang Universe Model". The Big Bang Universe Model is not a conjecture, and its main evidence is the cosmic microwave background radiation.

The essence of cosmic microwave background radiation is the electromagnetic wave radiation left over from the Big Bang. It is a kind of thermal radiation that is spread throughout the universe.

So how do we calculate the age of the universe based on the "Big Bang Universe Model"? This involves the Hubble constant, which reflects the expansion rate of the universe. The universe has been expanding since its birth, which is also accurately predicted by Einstein's general theory of relativity. Through the expansion rate of the universe, we can calculate the age of the universe, which is the origin of 13.82 billion years. If we tell you now that scientists have discovered a star that is more than 13.82 billion years old, would you find it incredible? Interestingly, this star is real. It is about 190 light-years away from the earth and is numbered "HD 140283".

"HD 140283" is the official number of this star, and this star has another name, which is "Methuselah Star".

From the name, we can see that this star must be very old, because "Methuselah" is a very long-lived person who appeared in the Bible. How old is Methuselah? In 2000, astronomers calculated the age of the star to be 16 billion years based on the measured data, which is far older than the age of the universe, which is 13.82 billion years. So it has a new name, that is, "the star that should not exist." Yes, if there is no calculation error, then this star should not exist. If it really exists, it is definitely not a good thing for the entire cosmology of mankind.

Could it be that there is something wrong with the calculation of the age of this star? How is the age of a star calculated? This requires the use of something called the Hertzsprung-Russell diagram.

The Hertzsprung-Russell diagram is a scatter diagram of the absolute magnitude or luminosity of stars relative to their spectral type or effective temperature. To explain, although a star is called a "star", it does not last forever. It also has an end to its lifespan. Moreover, a star will go through different evolutionary stages from birth to death. In each evolutionary stage, it will show different characteristics. Stars of different masses and volumes will have very different evolutionary processes. However, this is only on the surface. In essence, the evolution of all stars still follows a certain law. To find this law, a large amount of observation and peer data is needed, so there is the Hertzsprung-Russell diagram.

The Hertzsprung-Russell diagram is a graph with the surface temperature or spectrum of a star as the horizontal axis and the absolute magnitude or width of the star as the vertical axis. People then gradually marked the observed stars on the Hertzsprung-Russell diagram according to the horizontal and vertical coordinates. Over time, as the number of stars on the diagram increased, the laws of stellar evolution gradually emerged.

Now, as long as we measure the surface temperature or spectral type of a star, as well as the absolute magnitude or luminosity, we can determine the type of star and the evolutionary stage it is in through the rules shown in the Hertzsprung-Russell diagram. Knowing the evolutionary stage of a star, we only need to measure the relative abundance and mass of the star, and then we can use a specific stellar evolution model to calculate the age of the star. This is how the 16 billion years of Methuselah were calculated.

The number 16 billion years is too outrageous, so the first reason scientists thought of was that the observation data was not comprehensive enough. Later, scientists used data from observation equipment such as the Hubble telescope to conduct a more in-depth analysis, and finally determined the age of this star to be between 13.2 billion and 14.6 billion years old.

Even according to the latest updated data, this star may still be older than the universe. If it is finally confirmed that the age of this star is indeed older than the universe, what does that mean? Does it mean that it is a product of another universe or the previous universe? This is a bit too fantasy. A more reliable explanation should be that our understanding of the universe is still imperfect, or there are errors in our past understanding. But even so, it’s no big deal. After all, we are too small to the universe, and there are too many mysteries of the universe for us.

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