Submission + - Star is found to be 13.2 billion years old
raguirre writes: Physorg.com reports that a star is found to be 13.2 billion years old . Recent cosmological studies show that the Big Bang occurred 13.7 billion years ago. The metal-poor star HE 1523 formed in our Milky Way galaxy soon afterwards, cosmologically speaking: 13.2 billion years ago. The primitive star contained the radioactive heavy elements uranium and thorium, and the amounts of those elements decay over time, each according to its own half-life. Today, astronomer Anna Frebel of the the University of Texas at Austin McDonald Observatory and her colleagues have deduced the star's age based on the amounts of radioactive elements it contains compared to certain other "anchor" elements, specifically europium, osmium and iridium.