NASA scientists have found what might be the oldest stars ever. Or maybe not. Apparently their methodology is a little suspect.
At the risk of politicizing science (in America? Never!), it’s kind of refreshing to read a news report about this kind of discovery wherein the he said/she said is because a Caltech researcher thinks that a NASA researcher didn’t do his job filtering out unobserved galaxies. If this had been in an American paper, there would have been a third side, and it would have been a fundie Christian talking about how these stars aren’t actually 14 billion years old because the universe was only created 6000 years ago, and God made the “old” stars to tempt the atheist heathen scientists away from their faith. And if it had been in the NYT, that person would have gotten the most space.
Speaking now as just an amateur fan of cosmology and astronomy, this is pretty cool, although of perhaps limited utility. But old stars! That rocks!
More astronomy news: we’re close – real damn close – like, days – hours even – to proving the existence of black holes. Which would be even cooler than the oldest stars in the history of time. Okay, maybe not cooler, but perhaps equally as kickassingly cool.