The age of the oldest known
star
A star is an astronomical object comprising a luminous spheroid of plasma (physics), plasma held together by its gravity. The List of nearest stars and brown dwarfs, nearest star to Earth is the Sun. Many other stars are visible to the naked ...
s approaches the
age of the universe
In physical cosmology, the age of the universe is the time elapsed since the Big Bang. Astronomers have derived two different measurements of the age of the universe:
a measurement based on direct observations of an early state of the universe, ...
, about 13.8 billion years. Some of these are among the first stars from
reionization
In the fields of Big Bang theory and cosmology, reionization is the process that caused matter in the universe to reionize after the lapse of the " dark ages".
Reionization is the second of two major phase transitions of gas in the universe (t ...
(the stellar dawn), ending the
Dark Ages about 370,000 years after Big Bang.
[ These are recognized as among the oldest individual stars observed so-far:
]
Footnotes
References
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