Stellar Archaeology: The Age of the Universe from the Oldest Stars ✦

Original: "The age of the Universe from a large sample of the oldest Galactic stars"

· Indranil Banik, Thenujaya Kudakolawa Kaluarachchige, Stephen Cookson, Harry Desmond

arXiv:2607.00764 · 2026-07-01 · CC BY 4.0 · 1 min · Cosmology Galaxies Stellar

155,000 ancient stars of the Milky Way point to a universe age of 13.73 billion years, bolstering standard cosmology and challenging trendy 'Hubble tension' hypotheses.

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155,000 stellar Methuselahs, nearly as old as the universe itself, have revealed to astronomers the secret of their birth. Their light is a fossilized chronicle. The analysis shows: the cosmos is older than the trendy 'fast' models predicted. The final age of 13.73 billion years rules out early accelerated expansion. The key to the Hubble puzzle seems not in ancient physics, but in the subtleties of modern measurements.

🎯 The oldest star in the sample, Gaia DR3 3656896440426302592, is 13.73 billion years old — just 0.2 billion years younger than the universe itself. With a typical error of 7.5%, its true age could be as high as 14 billion years! Imagine: the light from a star that is a peer of the cosmos traveled to us for 13.7 billion years.

A_U = A_\star + t_f

The total age of the universe equals the age of the oldest observed star plus the time from the Big Bang to the formation of the first long-lived stars.

H_0 A_U = \frac{2\,\text{arcsinh}\sqrt{\frac{1-\Omega_m}{\Omega_m}}}{3\sqrt{1-\Omega_m}}

This expression allows calculating the age from the modern values of the Hubble constant H₀ and the matter density parameter Ωm, independent of the CMB.

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Stellar Archaeology: The Age of the Universe from the Oldest Stars ✦