Age of Milky Way

It is extremely complex to define the age at which the Milky Way shaped, but the age of the oldest star in the Galaxy yet exposed, HE 1523-0901, is predictable to be about 13.2 billion years, almost as old as the Universe itself.

This estimate is based on examine by a side of astronomers in 2004 using the UV-Visual Echelle Spectrograph of the Very Large Telescope to calculate, for the first time, the beryllium happy of two stars in globular cluster NGC 6397. From this study, the elapsed time among the rise of the first generation of stars in the entire Galaxy and the first creation of stars in the cluster was deduced to be 200 million to 300 million years. By including the predictable age of the stars in the globular cluster, they predictable the age of the oldest stars in the Milky Way at 13.6 ± 0.8 billion years. Based ahead this emerging science, the Galactic thin disk is predictable to have been formed among 6.5 and 10.1 billion being ago.