“Let others praise ancient times; I am glad I was born in these.” -Ovid
With all that we know of astronomy, with the hundreds of billions of galaxies and hundreds of billions of stars in each that we know are there, it might surprise you to learn that the stars -- for the most part -- don't segregate themselves by age, but rather live together in well-mixed populations.
Image credit: European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope, of Planetary Nebula IC 1295.
So how, then could we possibly hope to find the oldest stars that are out there? Believe it or not, we have more than just a simple clue, and we've been able to go farther back than most people ever imagined.
Image credit: star HD 140283, via Digitized Sky Survey (DSS), STScI/AURA, Palomar/Caltech, and UKSTU/AAO.
Find out what we know about the oldest stars in the Universe today!
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