'Oldest star' found from iron fingerprints: astronomers
10 Feb 2014 - 5:35pm
'Oldest star' found from iron fingerprints: astronomers
Source AFP
UPDATED 9 MINS AGO
Australian astronomers on Sunday said they had found a star 13.6 billion years old, making it the most ancient star ever seen.
The star was formed just a couple of hundred million years after the Big Bang that brought the Universe into being, they believe.
Previous contenders for the title of oldest star are around 13.2 billion years old -- two objects described by European and US teams respectively in 2007 and 2013.
Stefan Keller at the Australian National University in the Australian capital, Canberra, said the Methuselah star is -- in cosmic terms -- relatively close to us. It lies in our own galaxy, the Milky Way, at a distance of around 6,000 light years from Earth.
The star catalogues list it by the number of SMSS J031300.36-670839.3.
"The telltale sign that the star is so ancient is the complete absence of any detectable level of iron in the spectrum of light emerging from the star," Keller said in an email exchange with AFP about the study.
More:
http://www.sbs.com.au/news/article/2014/02/10/oldest-star-found-iron-fingerprints-astronomers
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Doesn't it seem odd that this oldest star (whose existence has been known for at least 100 years) is in our own (relatively young) galaxy, and why isn't it closer to the center? Oh, well. Science keeps searching. New surprises every decade 
Astronomers have estimated the age of the Milky Way to be about 11 billion years old. Almost as old as the Universe itself. For all we know, this was one of the first stars to form our galaxy.
Just sayin'...