Hubble telescope dates oldest star at 14.5 billion years old

Digitized Sky Survey (DSS), STScI/AURA, Palomar/Caltech, and UKSTU/AAO

The Hubble space telescope has enabled astronomers to identify the oldest known star whose age we can reliably estimate.

With a birthdate around 14.5 billion years ago and a margin for error of 0.8 billion years (depending on how youthful the star wishes to appear to others), HD 140283 has been given the slightly more memory-friendly name "the Methuselah star", a reference to the oldest person to ever live according to the Bible.

Previous estimates of the star's age had it celebrating it's super sweet sixteen billion but, as NASA points out, the fact that the Universe's age has been calculated at around 13.8 billion presented some obvious problems. The revised estimate and accompanying wiggle room allow for the Methuselah star, cosmology, and stellar physics to carry on coexisting comfortably.