Astronomers have discovered a Methuselah of stars — a denizen of the Solar System's neighbourhood that is at least 13.2 billion years old and formed shortly after the Big Bang.
“We believe this star is the oldest known in the Universe with a well determined age,” says Howard Bond, an astronomer at Pennsylvania State University in University Park, who announced the finding on 10 January at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Long Beach, California1.
The venerable star, dubbed HD 140283, lies at a comparatively short distance of 190 light years from the Solar System and has been studied by astronomers for more than a century. Researchers have long known that the object consists almost entirely of hydrogen and helium — a hallmark of having formed early in the history of the Universe, before successive generations of stars had a chance to forge heavier elements. But no one knew exactly how old it was.
Old timer
Determining the star’s age required several steps. First, Bond and his team made a new and more accurate determination of the star’s distance from the Solar System, using 11 sets of observations recorded between 2003 and 2011 using the Hubble Space Telescope’s Fine Guidance Sensors, which measure the position of target stars relative to reference stars. The astronomers also measured the brightness of the star as it appears in the sky, and were then able to calculate its intrinsic luminosity.
Read the entire article:
http://www.nature.com/news/nearby-star-is-almost-as-old-as-the-universe-1.12196
Look past the details of a wonky discovery by a group of California scientists -- that a quantum state is now observable with the human eye -- and consider its implications: Time travel may be feasible. Doc Brown would be proud.
The strange discovery by quantum physicists at the University of California Santa Barbara means that an object you can see in front of you may exist simultaneously in a parallel universe -- a multi-state condition that has scientists theorizing that traveling through time may be much more than just the plaything of science fiction writers.
And it's all because of a tiny bit of metal -- a "paddle" about the width of a human hair, an item that is incredibly small but still something you can see with the naked eye.
UC Santa Barbara's Andrew Cleland cooled that paddle in a refrigerator, dimmed the lights and, under a special bell jar, sucked out all the air to eliminate vibrations. He then plucked it like a tuning fork and noted that it moved and stood still at the same time.
Read the entire article: http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2010/04/05/freaky-physics-proves-parallel-universes/
We'll have to recalibrate everything -- the age of the universe, the age of stars, the distance to the stars, the basic structure of modern electronics, the GPS, nuclear weapons -- all of that would have to be recalibrated and rethought ...
Most of the human race don't have any problem making time disappear - but scientists have cracked a very hi-tech way of doing exactly that. Scientists have developed a 'temporal cloaking' device that can hide events from view.
The demonstration 'hid' events for 40 trillionths of a second - or 40 picoseconds - by speeding up and slowing down different parts of a light beam.
The different parts of the light beam were then put back together, so that any observers could not detect what happened during the 'hidden' time.
The information is simply not there to be read or reconstructed.
So far, the technique only works on periods of 0.00012 of a second - so the police can probably rest easy, as evildoers would have to move far faster than human beings ever could to 'conceal' their actions.
Instead, the 'hidden' fractions of a second could be used for ultra-secure communications.
The scientists think that the technique could even be combined with recent advances in optical 'cloaking' - to hide an event in both space and time.
Read the entire article: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2082266/Lets-time-warp-Scientists-create-cloaking-device-hide-events.html
'Through the wormhole, the scientist can see himself as he was one minute ago. But what if our scientist uses the wormhole to shoot his earlier self? He's now dead. So who fired the shot?'
