What's the oldest star in the universe? What about the youngest? (2024)

What's the oldest star in the universe? What about the youngest? (1)

Among the countless stars glittering in the vastness of space, some are so old they have experienced the dawn of the universe, and others are so young that not even the most powerful telescopes on Earth have been able to observe them. But is it possible to know which star is the youngest and which is the oldest?

The youngest star in our universe is difficult to pinpoint because stars are constantly being born, but there are a few candidates among the ones we know. In contrast, scientists have known about the oldest star on record — appropriately nicknamed Methuselah — for decades.

Stars are born deep inside enormous clouds of dust and gas known as nebulas. According to NASA, some clumps of gas in the nebula are weighed down by so much material that their own gravity forces them to collapse (since more mass means more gravity), and the intense gravitational pull in the center of a collapsing cloud causes gas — mostly hydrogen— to accrete into what becomes a protostar. These star embryos start to fuse hydrogen nuclei into helium and emit radiation in the process. A star cannot be called a star until it radiates energy, which is how it becomes so incredibly bright. Some faint stars are only just shining into life.

What's the oldest star in the universe? What about the youngest? (2)

Astronomer Ruobing Dong, an assistant professor in the Department of Physics & Astronomy at the University of Victoria in Canada, has observed these nascent stars. He led a 2022 study in the journal Nature Astronomy on a binary protostar system that is thought to be only about a million years old. Dong and his colleagues were able to put an approximate age to some of these star embryos. They often throw tantrums, otherwise known as accretion outbursts.

"When the stars undergo accretion outbursts, they become hotter and much more luminous," Dong told Live Science in an email. "The material around them is heated up. Ice in the protoplanetary disk may evaporate, and some chemical reactions in the disk may be triggered because the material is heated up."

Because young stars are still accreting material, they expel immense jets of gas, or gaseous outflows, from either end as a result. This means they are still accreting mass. Because outflows fade as they grow older, the amount of gas being released helps astronomers estimate a star's age. More gas means a younger star.

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. That would have made it older than the universe, which is around 13.8 billion years old. Astronomers immediately suggested there had been an error in how the age of this star was calculated. If not, that raised the possibility that the universe came into existence eons earlier than previously thought.

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To get to the bottom of the matter, astronomers used the Hubble Space Telescope to re-determine Methuselah's age in 2013, and came up with an estimate of 14.5 billion years based on its brightness and its distance from Earth, which is about 190 light-years. That would make it only slightly older than the cosmos, though there are error bars on the age estimate.

Related: What is the largest known star in the universe? (What about the smallest?)

"We measured the distance in order to determine the absolute luminosity, and thus the age, with the help of theoretical studies of stellar evolution," said Howard Bond, an astronomer emeritus at the Space Telescope Science Institute, the operations center for the Hubble Space Telescope in Maryland, who helped date Methuselah. "We found an age that was compatible — within the uncertainties of the measurement and of the theory — with the age of the universe."

Methuselah is a subgiant star, which is brighter than most stars but still not as bright as giant stars, which are so huge that their size seems abnormal for their temperature and mass, Bond told Live Science in an email. Subgiants are also redder than giants. Stars release energy by burning hydrogen in their cores and converting it to helium through nuclear fusion. Massive stars reach the subgiant phase when they begin to deplete their hydrogen reserves. In this phase of a star's life, its brightness, or luminosity, becomes an excellent way to estimate its age. Fainter subgiant stars are older.

Methuselah is reddish and has been slowly dimming over billions of years, though its relatively close proximity to Earth means it doesn’t appear too dim to us and can be seen with the right binoculars. The sun has hardly lived in comparison. Our star is just under 5 billion years old and expected to live about 5 billion more years, when it will cool down and swell so far into the solar system that it will engulf its orbiting planets, including Earth.

Elizabeth Rayne is a contributing writer for Live Science. Her work has appeared in SYFY WIRE, Forbidden Futures, Grunge and Den of Geek. She holds a bachelor of arts in English literature from Fairfield University in Connecticut and a master's degree in English writing from Fordham University, and most enjoys writing about space, along with biology, chemistry, physics, archaeology and paleontology.

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What's the oldest star in the universe? What about the youngest? (2024)

FAQs

What is the oldest known star in the universe? ›

The oldest star in the known universe is the Methuselah star, also known as HD 140283, a subgiant star. Methuselah is located in the constellation Libra, close to the Milky Way galaxy's Ophiuchus border, and around 190 light-years away from the Earth. It has a 7.205 apparent magnitude.

What is the youngest star in the universe? ›

There is no youngest star because stars are constantly forming.

Is the Methuselah star really older than the universe? ›

One study suggested that the “Methuselah Star” is older than the Universe itself. The Universe is thought to be 13.797 billion years old, with an uncertainty of ±0.023 billion years. In 2013, a measurement of the “Methuselah Star” suggested that it is 14.45 billion years old — older than the age of the Universe.

What is the maximum age of a star? ›

Most stars are between 1 billion and 10 billion years old. Some stars may even be close to 13.8 billion years old—the observed age of the universe. The oldest star yet discovered, HD 140283, nicknamed Methuselah star, is an estimated 14.46 ± 0.8 billion years old.

What is the oldest thing in the universe? ›

What's more, in May 2021, another group of astronomers revised the best estimates for the age and mass of Methuselah and, having modeled how stars change over time, they found its age to be 12 billion years.

Who is the oldest star alive? ›

1. Elisabeth Waldo – Born June 1918. Elisabeth Waldo is 105 years old, making her the oldest living celebrity still alive today.

How long do stars live? ›

Every star has its own life cycle, ranging from a few million to trillions of years, and its properties change as it ages.

What is the oldest planet in the universe? ›

How old is the oldest known planet? Almost as old as the universe, it turns out. At 12.7 billion years old, planet Psr B1620-26 B is almost three times the age of Earth, which formed some 4.5 billion years ago.

What is the coldest known star? ›

According to a new study, a star discovered 75 light-years away is no warmer than a freshly brewed cup of coffee. Dubbed CFBDSIR 1458 10b, the star is what's called a brown dwarf.

Who is the oldest human in the universe? ›

The oldest living person in the world whose age has been validated is 117-year-old Maria Branyas of Spain, born 4 March 1907.

How old is the universe in the Bible? ›

Concerning the age of the Earth, the Bible's genealogical records combined with the Genesis 1 account of creation are used to estimate an age for the Earth and universe of about 6000 years, with a bit of uncertainty on the completeness of the genealogical records, allowing for a few thousand years more.

What is the biggest thing in the universe? ›

The biggest single entity that scientists have identified in the universe is a supercluster of galaxies called the Hercules-Corona Borealis Great Wall. It's so wide that light takes about 10 billion years to move across the entire structure. For perspective, the universe is only 13.8 billion years old.

How many galaxies are there in the universe? ›

It is estimated that there are between 200 billion (2×1011) to 2 trillion galaxies in the observable universe. Most galaxies are 1,000 to 100,000 parsecs in diameter (approximately 3,000 to 300,000 light years) and are separated by distances in the order of millions of parsecs (or megaparsecs).

Could the universe be older than we think? ›

If the findings of this latest research prove accurate, the Big Bang may have taken place 26.7 billion years ago, making the actual age of the universe nearly twice as old as we thought.

Is the Earth older than the universe? ›

The universe at approximately 13.8 billion years old is much older than Earth. Earth is 4.5 billion years old. We know this thanks to a method called radiometric dating, which measures the amount of radioactive decay of isotopes in a sample to calculate how old that sample must be.

What was the first star in the universe? ›

The first stars are known as Population III stars, and none have ever been observed, as they are too faint. The first stars had to make do with what they had available, and formed from clouds containing only hydrogen and helium.

What is the oldest form of a star? ›

Ancient star, but not one of the first: One of the oldest known stars ever observed is a subgiant star in the Milky Way, just 190 light-years from Earth. The star, known as HD 140283 or the Methuselah star, appears to be almost as old as the universe.

What is the oldest galaxy in the universe? ›

SETTING NEW RECORDS, the James Webb Space Telescope has discovered the oldest known galaxy known to the universe and humankind. Caught and snapped in the cosmos, the GLASS-z13 galaxy was formed just 300 million years after the Big Bang, which struck 13.8 billion years ago.

Are white dwarfs the oldest stars? ›

These stars are the closest known examples of the oldest stars in the universe forming soon after the Big Bang. A University of Oklahoma assistant professor and colleagues have identified two white dwarf stars considered the oldest and closest known.

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