Methuselah, according to the Hebrew Bible, was the oldest person to ever live. So it is certainly very appropriate giving that name to the oldest known star out there in the universe. Milky Way galaxy’s Methuselah star, formally known as HD 140283, was actually thought to be 16 billion years old. But that didn’t make sense as the Big Bang that created our universe happened about 13.8 billion years ago. But now, new research seems to have put things in order.

Howard Bond, of Pennsylvania State University and the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, and his team used the Hubble Space Telescope to find the correct distance to the star. It was found to be 190.1 light-years. Then they worked out its intrinsic brightness, and also learned about the star’s burn rate, composition and internal structure.

The result of all these calculations is that they found Methuselah’s age to be 14.5 billion years, but there’s a margin of error of around 800 million years.

According to Bond, “Put all of those ingredients together, and you get an age of 14.5 billion years, with a residual uncertainty that makes the star’s age compatible with the age of the universe“.

So it is 13.7 billion years old, therefore younger than the universe, just barely though. But future calculations might bring down its age even further, but by that time they might find an even older star. What are your thoughts on this star and the age of the universe? 

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Now, it seems like the CERN scientists who work with the Large Hadron Collider and discovered the Higgs boson “God” particle are saying that the end of the universe could happen very abruptly, traveling at the speed of light through the universe and wiping us off the face of existence. “It may be that the universe we live in is inherently unstable,” said theoretical physicist Joseph Lykken. “At some point, billions of years from now, it’s all going to be wiped out… The universe wants to be in a different state, so eventually to realize that, a little bubble of what you might think of as an alternate universe will appear somewhere, and it will spread out and destroy us.”

He says that this could happen “billions of years from now,” but it could theoretically happen tomorrow. “The bubble forms through an unlikely quantum fluctuation,” said Lykken, “at a random time and place.” The good news is that this will happen so fast that we won’t feel a thing. The universe “bubble” will pop and that’ll be that. In fact, it’s quite possible that it was a similar event that caused what we consider to be the Big Bang. The death of our universe could, in effect, become the birth of another. In that regard, I guess we live on?

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Picture God taking a peek at the universe, rotating planets with his mighty arms, going from the Earth to Jupiter with a single gesture, and speeding, slowing and reversing time with the movement of an index finger. That will look somewhat like what Microsoft Surface researcher David Brown is doing in the clip below with his superb space app dubbed NUIverse. The app is simply marvellous!

From the demonstration, you will get to know about the awesome multi-touch capabilities of Microsoft Surface and the computational power of the Samsung SUR40 which runs NUIverse (anagram of the word universe and NUI stands for natural user interface, in case you didn’t notice).

If you own a smartphone, you might be familiar with a lot of NUI gestures such as grabs, twists and swipes. You will find all those being used by Brown, but the new app is much more than that. He is utilizing gestures to move about in the universe in both time and space, and using on-screen dials for controlling effects such as the camera FOV and the passage of time. He is even using transparent disks which can be placed on the screen and moved. The disk provides him with details of the objects it covers.

But, a good video is sometimes better than a thousand words, right? So, head below to know more about the app.

The thing, on which it runs, by the way, comes with a price tag of $9,049 (including the stand). The application is not slowed down at any point all thanks to the power of the SUR40. And we are not sure whether the app will be available commercially, but we might see it used for educational purposes in the future. It will be great if they release the program for planetariums.

You can close your mouth now and check out another video which shows the on-screen action of the app in use. The music in this video is kinda cool.

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