The Age of The Universe
Most astronomers would agree that the age of the Universe - the time elapsed since the "Big Bang" - is one of the "holy grails of cosmology". Despite great efforts during recent years, the various estimates of this basic number have resulted in rather diverse values. Current cosmological models which are used to derive the age of the Universe have to make a number of theoretical assumptions, and these assumptions are not very well supported by the incomplete available observational data. At present, a value in the range of 10-16 billion years is considered most likely.
But now, an international team of astronomers has used the European Southern Observatory’s “Very Large Telescope” (VLT) and its efficient spectrograph to perform a unique measurement that paves the way for a new and more accurate determination of the age of the Universe. They measured for the first time the amount of the radioactive isotope Uranium-238 in a star that was born when the Milky Way was still forming. It is the first measurement ever of uranium outside the Solar System. This method works in a way similar to the well-known Carbon-14 dating in archaeology, but over much longer time scales. So how exactly does it work? Well, first we have to understand a little bit about how stars form and how they age.
Stellar Evolution
While hydrogen, helium and lithium were
produced during the Big Bang, all heavier elements result from nuclear reactions
in the interiors of stars. For details of exactly how this happens, you
can read the relevant sections on stellar evolution on this web site. The
main message is that when stars die, heavy-element enriched matter is dispersed
into surrounding space and eventually becomes incorporated in the next
generations of stars. In fact, the gold in the ring on your finger was
produced in an exploding star and deposited in the interstellar cloud from which
the Sun and its planets were later formed. Thus, the older a star is, the
lower is generally its content of heavy elements like iron and other metals.
Measurements have shown that very old stars that are members of large
agglomerations known as globular clusters are normally quite
"metal-poor"- their metal-content ranges down to about 1/200 of that
of the Sun, in which these metals constitute only 2% of the total mass, the rest
being still in the form of hydrogen and helium. This is because it is
believed that the globular clusters formed early in the life of the Universe.
Scientists have been searching
for even older stars for a long time, and after decades of mostly fruitless
efforts, a large spectral survey by American astronomer Timothy
C. Beers and his collaborators has recently uncovered hundreds of stars with
much lower metal content than even the globular clusters, in some cases only
1/10,000 of the solar value. It is
evident that these extremely metal-poor stars must have formed during the very
infancy of the Milky Way. These
particular stars exhibit a great variety of element abundances that may
ultimately throw more light on the processes at work during this early period.
As a step in this direction, an international team of astronomers decided
to study these stars in much more detail. In
2000 and 2001 they were awarded observing time on the VLT and used its very
efficient high-dispersion spectrograph to carry out their observations.
Not unexpectedly, a lot of new information has been obtained.
Which takes us back to the use of Uranium-238 as a clock.
Cosmic
Time Clock
It is possible to make a fundamental determination of the age of a star,
provided it contains a suitably long-lived radioactive isotope.
The use of this procedure depends on the measurement of the abundance of
the radioactive isotope, as compared to a stable one.
As was said at the beginning, this technique is analogous to the
Carbon-14 dating method that has been so successful in archaeology over time
spans of up to a few tens of thousands of years.
In astronomy, however, this technique must obviously be applied to vastly
longer time scales. For the method
to work well, the right choice of radioactive isotope is very critical.
Contrary to stable elements that formed at the same time, the abundance
of a radioactive (unstable) isotope decreases all the time.
The faster the decay, the less there will be left of the radioactive
isotope after a certain time, the greater will be the abundance difference when
compared to a stable isotope, and the more accurate is the resulting age.
Yet, for the clock to remain useful, the radioactive element must not
decay too fast - there must still be enough left of it to allow an accurate
measurement, even after several billion years.
This leaves only two possible
isotopes we can use for astronomical measurements, Thorium-232, with a half-life
of 14.05 billion years and Uranium-238, with a half-life of 4.47 billion years.
Several age determinations have been made by means of the Thorium-232
isotope. Its strongest spectral
line is measurable with current telescopes in a handful of comparatively bright
stars, including the Sun. However,
the decay is really too slow to provide sufficiently accurate time measurements.
It takes around 47 billion years for this isotope to decay by a factor of
10, and with a typical measuring uncertainty of 25%, the resulting age
uncertainty is about 4-5 billion years, or approx. one third of the age of the
Universe! This slow-moving clock
runs forever, but is hard to read accurately!
The faster decay of Uranium-238 would make it a much more precise cosmic
clock. However, because uranium is
the rarest of all normal elements, its spectral lines in stars are always very
weak, and if visible at all they normally drown entirely in a vast ocean of
stronger spectral lines from more abundant elements.
Nevertheless, this is exactly where the low abundance of heavier elements
in very old stars comes to the rescue. In the stars that were studied by the team using the VLT,
which typically contain 1,000 times less of the common elements than the Sun,
the predominance of the maze of atomic and molecular lines in the spectrum is
greatly reduced. The lines of rare
elements like uranium therefore stand a real chance of being measurable.
So the
astronomers using the VLT became very excited when they examined the spectrum of
the 12th-magnitude star CS 31082-001. It
showed what is probably the richest spectrum of rare, heavy elements ever seen.
In particular, the faint lines of these elements were unusually free of
interference from the lines of the iron-group elements and from molecular lines
(of CH and CN), which are often quite numerous, even in such low-metallicity
stars. While only one or at most
two thorium lines have ever been measured in any other stars, no less than 14
thorium lines are seen in the spectrum of CS 31082-001. Best of all, the long sought-after line of singly ionized
uranium is clearly detected at its rest wavelength of 389.59 nm in the
near-ultraviolet region of the spectrum. Not
surprisingly, the uranium line is still quite weak. After all, uranium is the rarest of elements to begin with
and it has further decayed by a factor of eight since this star was born.
But using the resolving power and light-gathering capability of the VLT,
in combination with the UV spectrograph, , the uranium line can be measured with
very good accuracy despite its faintness.
The results of this work have
produced a most likely age for CS 31082-001 of 12.5 billion years.
Estimates of the age of the Universe using different techniques range
from 11 to 16 million years, the Universe
is older than CS 31082-001, hence it must be older than 12.5 billion years. So how accurate is this measurement, and how much faith can
we place in the numbers?
Limits of Error
Well, because of the faster decay rate of Uranium-238 and the highly
accurate spectroscopic measurement which is now possible, the age uncertainty
for the stellar observation is only ± 1.5 bn years.
Of more concern is the lack of sufficiently detailed knowledge regarding
the way Uranium-238 decays and also uncertainties in the available laboratory
data for uranium by which chemical abundances are calculated using measured line
strengths. The errors inherent in
both these fundamental understandings of the way U-238 behaves are greater than
those associated with the stellar measurement.
Work is now underway at laboratories in France and Sweden to
improve this basic data, so that the overall measurement error can be
reduced. In the meantime, the
astronomical team is trying to find other stars like CS 31082-001. There may
not be many, but if the uranium line can be seen and measured in more spectra,
it will also become possible to judge whether those very old stars, as surmised,
are all of about the same age, i.e. that of our Milky Way galaxy.