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Scientists at Australian National University may have discovered the oldest stars in the Milky Way, formed before the galaxy itself, a discovery they say is as likely as finding a “needle in a haystack.” The research adds to scientists’ growing understanding of how the galaxy came to be. 

What researchers described as a groundbreaking study, published Wednesday in the journal Nature, details the discovery of nine stars found at the center of the Milky Way with traits suggesting they were some of the first stars ever formed. Scientists said the stars dated to roughly 13.6 billion years ago or some 200 million years — a relatively short time frame when talking about the universe — after the Big Bang, the leading theory of how the universe was born. 

“These pristine stars are among the oldest surviving stars in the Universe, and certainly the oldest stars we have ever seen,” Louise Howes, the study’s lead author, said in a statement. 

The fact that these stars were discovered in the center of the Milky Way alone suggests they’re older than most stars. Howes said the Milky Way formed around the galaxy’s oldest stars. 

The makeup of a really old star: These newly discovered stars are mostly pure energy, with low levels of carbon and iron, which contradicts scientists’ theory the early universe was laden with these elements. It’s long been believed the first stars exploded as a supernova, which would make the stars dense with heavy elements and less energy. 

 

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It’s been said that Marie Antoinette’s hair turned white the night before she was beheaded. The assumption is that the stress caused by her impending date with doom caused her locks to lose their color within hours. For what it’s worth, most scientists debunk the story but at the same time, do acknowledge that stress can play a role in the gradual process of hair turning gray.

Women start to go gray around age 35; men turn silvery around age 30. Depending on genes and overall health, gray hairs can make their first appearance in high school or come as late as age 50 for some people.

To understand whether your teenager can actually be blamed for causing you to go gray, you need to understand a bit of our physiology. A typical human head has about 100,000 follicles, each one capable of sprouting several hairs in a lifetime. At the bottom of each follicle is a little hair-growing factory where cells work together to assemble colored hair. The color comes from a pigment called melanin. Hair that has lost most of its melanin is gray; hair that has lost all of its melanin is white.

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NASA’s advanced Kepler Space Telescope has been on the hunt for Earth-like planets in recent months, however, none have been capable of sustaining forms of life due to variables like a lack of water, an atmosphere that can’t support life, or harsh temperatures. However, CNN reported Thursday researchers have found two new planets — one on the edge of Earth’s solar system about 39 light-years away, another just outside of the region — that may be the first of their kind capable of hosting alien forms.”We haven’t even found anything close to this so far,” University of Maryland astronomer Drake Deming told CNN. “It’s more habitable, it’s less harsh and this gives us a good strong chance of actually finding life or something as opposed to the other Earth-like planets found to date.”

The planet nearest the solar system, dubbed GJ 1132b, is rocky, slightly bigger than Earth with 1.6 times the mass, and maintains a temperature of 260 degrees Celsius. “Our ultimate goal is to find a twin Earth, but along the way we’ve found a twin Venus,” Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics astronomer David Charbonneau told Telegraph. “We suspect it will have a Venus-like atmosphere too, and if it does we can’t wait to get a whiff.”

“If we find this pretty hot planet has managed to hang onto its atmosphere over the billions of years it’s been around, that bodes well for the long-term goal of studying cooler planets that could have life,” Zachory Berta-Thompson of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research, said in a statement. “We finally have a target to point our telescopes at, and [can] dig much deeper into the workings of a rocky exoplanet, and what makes it tick.”

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The lavish villa sat overlooking the Bay of Naples, offering bright ocean views to the well-heeled Romans who came from across the empire to study. The estate’s library was stocked with texts by prominent thinkers of the day, in particular a wealth of volumes by the philosopher Philodemus, an instructor of the poet Virgil.

But the seaside library also sat in the shadow of a volcano that was about to make terrible history.

The 79 A.D. eruption of Mount Vesuvius is most famous for burying Pompeii, spectacularly preserving many artifacts—and residents—in that once-bustling town south of Naples. The tumbling clouds of ash also entombed the nearby resort of Herculaneum, which is filled with its own wonders. During excavations there in 1752, diggers found a villa containing bundles of rolled scrolls, carbonized by the intense heat of the pyroclastic flows and preserved under layers of cement-like rock. Further digs showed that the scrolls were part of an extensive library, earning the structure the name Villa of the Papyri.

Blackened and warped by the volcanic event, the roughly 1,800 scrolls found so far have been a challenge to read. Some could be mechanically unrolled, but hundreds remain too fragile to make the attempt, looking like nothing more than clubs of charcoal. Now, more than 200 years later, archaeologists examining two of the scrolls have found a way to peer inside them with x-rays and read text that has been lost since antiquity.

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A closeup of a Herculaneum papyrus scroll used in an international scanning project. E. Brun

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