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Comment by bufferoverflow | Hacker News Reader

Considering there are 200 to 1000 billion galaxies (based on what we can see), the odds of that is not just astronomically low, it's basically impossible.

Which tells you that the method for determining the age of stars is wrong.

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Why exactly? It's three of the oldest stars, not the three oldest stars.

There could be a quadrillion stars of a similar age and the statement could still be true.

Ok, then the wording is horrible. As you can consider all the stars except the youngest one as "the oldest stars".

I think the wording is fine. While technically you are correct, most people will not interpret "three of the oldest" to mean that they could be 2 seconds old as long as there is another star which is 1 second old.

It's a common journalist tactic that allows for painting a misleading picture. E.g., I read a story earlier today about "State X among the worst states for Y". The state could be #2 out of 50, and they'd be "among the worst 49". The state could be #49 out of 50, and they'd be "among the worst 2".

Same thing here. Three of the oldest stars? It means literally nothing but it paints a picture.

“The oldest stars in the universe” are a cohort, not a ranking, and these three are members of it.

The big bang happened right here, not in some distant galaxy.

Thus if there are old stars then they'd be ..... right here.

There are estimates that half the matter, including the older stars in our Galaxy came from other galaxies that were absorbed long ago (10B+ years) by the Milky Way. The younger stars have been formed here in the disk.

So on average a large portion of the oldest stars tend to have been from elsewhere, whereas the newer stars were born here.

They have just dropped the qualifier "known" from the title, as in it should be read "Three of the oldest known stars found in our galaxy".

We obviously don't know the age of each and every star in the entire universe, calm down dude.

I feel like it's quite reasonable to criticize them for that though. "Known" isn't something we can automatically assume - there could be theoretical boundaries on star life and these objects were detected as being extremely close to that boundary.

Known kind of by definition implies that it's based on our current knowledge.

I'd clarify - there's a distinction between "oldest observed" and "oldest we think are possible" and the known in this context (for me at least) leans strongly into the "oldest observed" camp for me - though, as with all things english, technically it could mean anything.

There are limits on how old stars can be. They obviously can't be older than the universe itself. It also took time for star formation to be possible. The paper itself argues these are among the oldest stars that can exist in the galaxy, although it doesn't say they are actually the "oldest", just members of the group.

(Disclaimer: I am not an expert) In my humble opinion, because the black hole calculations and other important proven scientific equations must have taken into account the age of stars, the age of a star could be imprecise but not outright wrong.

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