http://rt.com/news/oldest-star-universe-discovery-889/

“Bond and his team calculated that the star is 13.9 billion years old. This actually places it beyond the time that the universe exists. The current estimate is that the Big Bang happened some 13.77 billion years ago. This is explained by an experimental error, which may be as large as 700 million years. So the star is at least 13.2 billion years old and may be several hundred million years older than that.”

It’s interesting that the calculated age of the star is older than the universe itself, and they adjust the margin of error to barely fit within the BB model.

AaronB - 13 January 2013 08:28 PM

http://rt.com/news/oldest-star-universe-discovery-889/

“Bond and his team calculated that the star is 13.9 billion years old. This actually places it beyond the time that the universe exists. The current estimate is that the Big Bang happened some 13.77 billion years ago. This is explained by an experimental error, which may be as large as 700 million years. So the star is at least 13.2 billion years old and may be several hundred million years older than that.”

It’s interesting that the calculated age of the star is older than the universe itself, and they adjust the margin of error to barely fit within the BB model.

That’s a bit misrepresentative of what the article says.  If a method really has a 700 million year window, you’d expect 5% of cases to have even more error than that.  I don’t think I need to point out just how many stars there are.

And here’s an interesting article about the the largest structure just discovered. It’s bigger than it’s supposed to be to fit in the BB model.

http://www.foxnews.com/science/2013/01/11/largest-structure-in-universe-discovered/

“This is hugely exciting, not least because it runs counter to our current understanding of the scale of the universe.”

“The newfound LQC is composed of 73 quasars and spans about 1.6 billion light-years in most directions, though it is 4 billion light-years across at its widest point.”

“The newly discovered LQC is so enormous, in fact, that theory predicts it shouldn’t exist, researchers said. The quasar group appears to violate a widely accepted assumption known as the cosmological principle, which holds that the universe is essentially homogeneous when viewed at a sufficiently large scale.  Calculations suggest that structures larger than about 1.2 billion light-years should not exist, researchers said.”

Well, the Big Bangers response to this is:
“This is an anomaly, but since BB gets everything else right it must be true.”
Then observers find out another prediction that is wrong and BBers respond:
“This is an anomaly, but since BB gets everything else right it must be true.”
Repeat ad absurdum.
Until the little boy says ”but the cosmologists are naked!” then everyone starts laughing.  This has not happened yet, but it will at one point.

And here’s another problem. It seems that the popular dark energy theory doesn’t fit the new data...

Lerner - 15 January 2013 01:49 AM

Well, the Big Bangers response to this is:
“This is an anomaly, but since BB gets everything else right it must be true.”
Then observers find out another prediction that is wrong and BBers respond:
“This is an anomaly, but since BB gets everything else right it must be true.”
Repeat ad absurdum.
Until the little boy says ”but the cosmologists are naked!” then everyone starts laughing.  This has not happened yet, but it will at one point.

Not to be obnoxious, but if big bang cosmology is incorrect, then why do so many stars fall inside the expected age range?  I mean, if a greater than 5% proportion of stars fell outside the expected age range as determined by an error prone metric, it would be a dramatic invalidation of a long-standing hypothesis, but cherry-picking data like that is hardly the correct approach to science, when there are known assumptions.  Let me make it clear I don’t disagree with plasma cosmology: as a layman, it’s out of my expertise.

I just don’t understand why this single data point is relevant, given the understood problems in the method of interpretation.  Is there some mechanic of the method that creates a hard limit to the observational error?