Oldest Known Star Discovered (Again)

The supposed oldest star.

 

 

Astronomers from Australian National University have discovered a star that has an age that is older than any other currently known star.  According to the article, this star is about 13.6 billion years old and offers insight into the chemistry of older stars.  The star was discovered by the university's own telescope and was confirmed with the Magellan Telescope in Chile. 

The way the astronomers date these stars is by looking at the iron content of the stars.  The more iron it has the older the star is.  This is probably because stars make light by fusion, and fusion of elements gradually increases until it stops at iron.  According to a quick Wikipedia search, iron is the heaviest stable element created by stellar nucleosynthesis, any heavier element created will quickly decay into iron.  If a star doesn't have much iron that means it hasn't been performing fusion for a long time (relatively) and thus must be pretty new.  The researchers mentioned in this article stated that the iron content of this star was found to be 60 times less than "any other star" which sounds pretty vague to me.  Personally I don't think this article is that interesting because I seem to have read this same article on many different occasions and they'll probably find another star that's older than this pretty soon.

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