Methuselah

You might not heard this name. Methuselah is a star 170 light-years far from us in the libra constellation. It’s just not a regular star but an insane one.

When it drew the attention of astronomers

In 2000, scientists tried to measure the age of this star, they were stunned by the results! It was a whopping 16,000,000,000 years old! Our universe itself is only a 13,800,000,000 years old. Scientists where shocked and decided to give more attention to this star. When they analysed the star they found that oxygen was way higher than other stars. As we all know, after the Big Bang the first element found was hydrogen. So scientists decreased its age to 14.46 billion.

But this is still 600 million years more than the universe’s age. Scientists tried to figure out the position of the star exactly. This will help them to identify the age by analysing the luminosity with the distance so they can find how bright it is. The brighter the star the younger.

After these scientists lowered its age to 14 billion. And still it’s 200 million years older than the universe.

When they tried to find the age of the universe

Scientists thought that the age of the universe may not be accurate. Perhaps they thought that methuselah was one of the first stars. So, they decided to measure the age of the universe. Then they tried to measure how fast the universe was expanding. The previous results were 67 km/s. But when they tried it now they got 75 km/s!

All thought that the universe was expanding at a constant speed and no. So this lowered the age of the universe to 12.7 billion years. When the tried getting more accurate results the number keeps going higher and higher. They got 82 km/s and the age was reduced to 11.4 billion!

Scientists thought that the universe simply expands at different speeds at different times. But none of the theories were able to prove this.

History

In the 80s and 90s there were stars which scientists thought were 20 billion years old. But modern tech proved that it’s not true. Maybe we can figure out methuselah’s true age in the future. Even physics we know today may be wrong.

If in future they find that this is not true still, I believe it’d be the oldest one

source:
https://youtu.be/jiSwvxA5v4Q