![]() ![]() This information was used to estimate an age for the star of 14.46 ± 0.8 billion years. ![]() A study published in 2013 used the Fine Guidance Sensors of NASA's Hubble Space Telescope to measure a precise parallax (and therefore distance and luminosity) for the star. Because of their relative scarcity, this is even rarer for a Population II star such as HD 140283. For field stars (as opposed to stars in clusters), it is rare to know a star's luminosity, surface temperature, and composition precisely enough to get a well-constrained value for its age. Age and significance īecause HD 140283 is neither on the main sequence nor a red giant, its early position in the Hertzsprung–Russell diagram has been interpreted with its data and theoretical models of stellar evolution based on quantum mechanics and the observations of processes in millions of stars to infer its apparent old age. The star was already known by 1912 when W. S. Adams measured its astrometry using a spectrograph in the Mount Wilson Observatory. It is one of the closest metal-poor ( Population II) stars to Earth. Modern spectroscopic analyses find an iron content about a factor of 250 lower than that of the Sun. Chamberlain and Lawrence Aller revealed it to have a substantially lower metal content than the Sun. An early spectroscopic analysis by Joseph W. The star's light is somewhat blueshifted as it is moving toward rather than away from the Earth and it has been known to astronomers for over a century as a high-velocity star based on its other vectors (proper motion). Its apparent magnitude is 7.205, so it can be seen with binoculars. HD 140283 (also known as the Methuselah star) is a metal-poor subgiant star about 190 light years away from the Earth in the constellation Libra, near the boundary with Ophiuchus in the Milky Way Galaxy. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |