Star light, star bright

By nick ramsey

  -  

Fri Feb 4, 2011 3:53 PM EST

(NASA)

Some of the first stars ever created, could still be shining somewhere in the night sky as part of the Milky Way galaxy. Scientists have run simulations that suggest some primordial stars may have survived for 13.4 billion years! That's 4,770,400,000,000 days. Which is really, really...really old.

That conflicts with the prevailing view right now in the scientific world which is this: in the beginning when there was a big bang that asploded — be it under the power of a random act or a Creator (God, Allah, the Flying Spaghetti Monster, Tom Cruise, etc.). The gas clouds created a stellar nursery where the first stars were born. Those first stars were huge behemoths that burned hot and fast and died out in a few million years.

But this new study published in Science by Paul Clark of the University of Heidelberg in Germany and his colleagues used simulations that found a different outcome. Their simulations found that those aforementioned gas clouds could have created multiple stellar nurseries instead of just one. Inside these stellar nurseries, their findings show, there could have been several tightly packed infant stars, and the one with the lowest mass could have been booted from the nursery before it had time to grow into a massive star like the rest. The study goes on to say:

A few of these ejected, underweight stars could have survived to the present day — if they managed to accumulate no more than the equivalent of 80 percent of the sun’s mass from their birth cloud...

There's been some scoffing at this notion from others in the scientific community. One critic noted, “This is an interesting and tantalizing result, but it is not based on computational physics but rather an ad hoc assumption.” Oh snap.

But what really interests me here... a reminder that the light we see in the night sky is really a portal back into time. And now... within the cast of that stellar show over our heads each night could be a few stars created 13.4 billion years ago. It's a perfect excuse to include my favorite YouTube video ever in this post which illustrates that space isn't just a big place... it's a really old place, too.

(American Museum of Natural History/YouTube)