Is this group of stars belonging to one generation, or more? That’s one of the things that was puzzling astronomers for decades, particularly when they were trying to pin down the age of IC 4499 — the globular cluster you see in this new picture from the Hubble Space Telescope.
While astronomers now know the stars are from a single generation that are about 12 billion years old (see this paper from three years ago), for about 15 years before that at least one paper said IC 4499 was three billion to four billion years younger than that.
“It has long been believed that all the stars within a globular cluster form at the about same time, a property which can be used to determine the cluster’s age,” stated information from the European Space Agency reposted on NASA’s website.
“For more massive globulars however, detailed observations have shown that this is not entirely true — there is evidence that they instead consist of multiple populations of stars born at different times.”
IC 4499 is somewhere in between these extremes, but only has a single generation of stars — its gravity wasn’t quite enough to pull in neighboring gas and dust to create more. Goes to show you how important it is to re-examine the results in science.
All this talk about the Universe and how old it is, well I have a few questions & doubts of my own. To me, time does not exist as an entity or as anything else. It is only a concept, a tool that helps regulate, separate and pace material things. The Universe’s physical make up could not, it seems to me, have been formed (into the current things we now see) in the short 13 billion years that has been estimated. Eons upon eons must have pass, I should think, for the magnificent structure of it, to come to be as we now see it. Look at it this way: You live with a child or two. The children grow little by little. you actually don’t notice it on account you are there to see them daily. But someone else who does not live with you will exclaim, “My how you’ve grown since the last time I saw you!” Like the Earth, the Universe is fully structured to recycle itself perpetually. Its existence will never end.