The Oldest Living Things on our Earth - Video

In this beautiful short trailer of 'The Oldest Living Things in the World' by filmmaker Jonathan Minnard offers glimpse of Rachel Sussman’s extraordinary world.



Interwoven with Sussman’s photographs and essays, brimming with equal parts passion and precision, are the stories of her adventures, and misadventures, as she trekked the world in search of her ancient subjects.

From a broken arm in remote Malaysia to a heart-wrenching breakup to a well-timed sip of whisky at polar explorer Shackleton’s grave (Grytviken), her personal stories imbue the universality of the deeper issues she explores with an inviting dose of humanity — a gentle reminder that life, for us as much as for those ancient organisms, is often about withstanding the uncontrollable, unpredictable, and unwelcome difficulties the universe throws our way, and that resilience comes from the dignity and humility of that withstanding.

“Our overblown intellectual faculties seem to be telling us both that we are eternal and that we are not,” philosopher Stephen Cave observed in his poignant meditation on our mortality paradox

And yet we continue to long for the secrets of the secrets of that ever-elusive eternity.

Bristlecone Pine: White Mountains, California

With an artist’s gift for “aesthetic force” and a scientist’s rigorous respect for truth, Sussman straddles a multitude of worlds as she travels across space and time to unearth Earth’s greatest stories of resilience, stories of tragedy and triumph, past and future, but above all stories that humble our human lives, which seem like the blink of a cosmic eye against the timescales of these ancient organisms — organisms that have unflinchingly witnessed all of our own tragedies and triumphs, our wars and our revolutions, our holocausts and our renaissances, and have remained anchored to existence more firmly than we can ever hope to be.

Brain Coral: Speyside, Tobago

And yet a great many of these species are on the verge of extinction, in no small part due to human activity, raising the question of how our seemingly ephemeral presence in the ecosystem can have such deep and long-term impact on organisms far older and far more naturally resilient than us.

Fortingall Yew: Perthshire, Scotland

ESA Herschel throws new light on oldest cosmic light

photons in the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB)

This illustration shows how photons in the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) are deflected by the gravitational lensing effect of massive cosmic structures as they travel across the Universe. 

Using data from ESA's Planck satellite, cosmologists have been able to measure this gravitational lensing of the CMB over the whole sky for the first time. 

Credit: ESA and the Planck Collaboration

Cosmologists have achieved a first detection of a long-sought component in the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB).

This component, known as B-mode polarisation, is caused by gravitational lensing, the bending of light by massive structures as it travels across the Universe.

The result is based on the combination of data from the South Pole Telescope and ESA's Herschel Space Observatory.

This detection is a milestone along the way to the possible discovery of another kind of B-mode signal in the polarised CMB - a signal produced by gravitational waves less than a second after the Universe began.

The Cosmic Microwave Background is the most ancient light that has travelled almost unimpeded across the Universe, and it contains a wealth of information about the origin and nature of the cosmos.

During their journey, photons from the CMB have encountered a multitude of galaxies and galaxy clusters and have been deflected by these large concentrations of matter.

This phenomenon, known as gravitational lensing, imprints a subtle distortion on the pattern of the CMB that encodes details about the large-scale distribution of structure in the Universe.

In recent years, cosmologists have detected the signature of gravitational lensing on the CMB temperature using data from ground-based and space-borne experiments, including the first all-sky image of this effect achieved using ESA's Planck satellite.

A small portion of the CMB is polarised, and gravitational lensing also affects this part of the signal. In fact, the polarised CMB is an additional and even richer treasure trove than the unpolarised signal to use to explore the Universe's past.

Now a team of cosmologists studying the polarised CMB has detected in it the signature of gravitational lensing, opening new and exciting possibilities to study the distribution of matter across the cosmos.

This result is also the first detection of the elusive second component of the CMB polarisation – the long-sought B-modes.

The study is based on the combination of data from SPTpol, the polarisation-sensitive receiver on the National Science Foundation's South Pole Telescope (SPT), and the SPIRE instrument on board ESA's Herschel Space Observatory.

The SPT is a ground-based telescope, located in Antarctica, to observe the CMB to very high angular resolution in a small patch of the southern sky.

ESA VLT: Oldest solar twin identified

This image tracks the life of a Sun-like star, from its birth on the left side of the frame to its evolution into a red giant star on the right. 

On the left the star is seen as a protostar, embedded within a dusty disc of material as it forms. It later becomes a star like our Sun. 

After spending the majority of its life in this stage, the star's core begins to gradually heat up, the star expands and becomes redder until it transforms into a red giant. 

Following this stage, the star will push its outer layers into the surrounding space to form an object known as a planetary nebula, while the core of the star itself will cool into a small, dense remnant called a white dwarf star. 

Marked on the lower timeline are where our Sun and solar twins 18 Sco and HIP 102152 are in this life cycle. 

The Sun is 4.6 billion years old and 18 Sco is 2.9 billion years old, while the oldest solar twin is some 8.2 billion years old -- the oldest solar twin ever identified. 

By studying HIP 102152, we can get a glimpse of what the future holds for our Sun. 

This image is illustrative; the ages, sizes, and colours are approximate (not to scale). The protostar stage, on the far left of this image, can be some 2000 times larger than our Sun. 

The red giant stage, on the far right of this image, can be some 100 times larger than the Sun. 

Credit: ESO/M. Kornmesser

An international team led by astronomers in Brazil has used ESO's Very Large Telescope to identify and study the oldest solar twin known to date.

Located 250 light-years from Earth, the star HIP 102152 is more like the Sun than any other solar twin—except that it is nearly four billion years older.

This older, but almost identical, twin gives us an unprecedented chance to see how the Sun will look when it ages.

The new observations also provide an important first clear link between a star's age and its lithium content, and in addition suggest that HIP 102152 may be host to rocky terrestrial planets.

Astronomers have only been observing the Sun with telescopes for 400 years—a tiny fraction of the Sun's age of 4.6 billion years.

It is very hard to study the history and future evolution of our star, but we can do this by hunting for rare stars that are almost exactly like our own, but at different stages of their lives.

Now astronomers have identified a star that is essentially an identical twin to our Sun, but 4 billion years older—almost like seeing a real version of the twin paradox in action.

Jorge Melendez (Universidade de São Paulo, Brazil), the leader of the team and co-author of the new paper explains: "For decades, astronomers have been searching for solar twins in order to know our own life-giving Sun better.

But very few have been found since the first one was discovered in 1997. We have now obtained superb-quality spectra from the VLT and can scrutinise solar twins with extreme precision, to answer the question of whether the Sun is special."

The team studied two solar twins—one that was thought to be younger than the Sun (18 Scorpii) and one that was expected to be older (HIP 102152).

They used the UVES spectrograph on the Very Large Telescope (VLT) at ESO's Paranal Observatory to split up the light into its component colours so that the chemical composition and other properties of these stars could be studied in great detail.

They found that HIP 102152 in the constellation of Capricornus (The Sea Goat) is the oldest solar twin known to date.

It is estimated to be 8.2 billion years old, compared to 4.6 billion years for our own Sun. On the other hand 18 Scorpii was confirmed to be younger than the Sun—about 2.9 billion years old.

More information: This research was presented in a paper to appear in "High precision abundances of the old solar twin HIP 102152: insights on Li depletion from the oldest Sun", by TalaWanda Monroe et al. in the Astrophysical Journal Letters. Research paper PDF

Oldest EVA Spacewalker: Russian cosmonaut Pavel Vinogradov (59)

Russian cosmonaut Pavel Vinogradov floats outside the International Space Station near the end of a 6.5-hour spacewalk on April 19, 2013. 

Vinogradov, 59, became the world's oldest spacewalker during a spacewalk that was only marred by the last-minute loss of an experiment. 

CREDIT: NASA TV

Pavel Vinogradov, a veteran cosmonaut, took his seventh cosmic excursion in 16 years during Friday's spacewalk.

He donned a bulky Russian Orlan-MK spacesuit and left the confines of the International Space Station just after 10 a.m. EDT (1400 GMT) to upgrade the orbiting lab with new experiments.

Vinogradov paired up with 41-year-old fellow cosmonaut Roman Romanenko, a first-time spacewalker but second-generation cosmonaut.

Romanenko's father, former cosmonaut Yuri Romanenko, logged more than 10 spacewalking hours in his career, including long stay durations in the Soyuz MIR Spacestation, a predecessor of the ISS.

The spacewalkers were at times lighthearted during the more-than-six-hour job.

"Nobody took a photo of me," Romanenko jokingly protested after heaing they used a camera to take pictures outside the lab. "How can it be like that? Please take a photo of me, Pavel."

In the last task of the spacewalk, Vinogradov was attempting to retrieve a panel from the Russian materials exposure experiment called Vinoslivost, but the panel flew out of his grasp before he had a chance to tether it. The cosmonauts were unable to recover the piece.

Flight controllers do not believe the 6.5-pound (3-kg) panel, which measured 18 inches by 12 inches (45 cm by 30 cm), hit any part of the space station.

NASA announcers noted that there is another Vinoslivost panel still attached to the space station that will be retrieved in a future spacewalk, so all is not lost from the experiment.

Vinogradov and Romanenko's primary objective was to install a new Russian experiment called Obstanovka, which will measure charged particles interact with a variety of materials kept outside of the space station.

Obstanovka could offer scientists new insights about how space weather affects the ionosphere, an active region of the Earth's atmosphere, NASA officials explained in a spacewalk description.

The pair also successfully retrieved a Biorisk canister, an experiment that measures the effects of bacteria and fungus on spacecraft materials, and prepared the outpost for the arrival of a robotic cargo ship later this year.

The spacewalkers are two members of the six-man Expedition 35 crew currently living aboard the International Space Station.

The others are Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield, Russian cosmonaut Alexander Misurkin, and NASA astronauts Thomas Marshburn and Chris Cassidy.

This was the 167th spacewalk dedicated to the construction and upkeep of the International Space Station, which was built by five different space agencies representing 15 countries.

Methuselah: Oldest Known Star HD 140283

Credit: Digitized Sky Survey (DSS), STScI/AURA, Palomar/Caltech, and UKSTU/AAO

This Digitized Sky Survey image shows the oldest star with a well-determined age in our galaxy. Called the Methuselah star, HD 140283 is 190.1 light-years away. 

Astronomers refined the star's age to about 14.5 billion years (which is older than the universe), plus or minus 800 million years. 

Image released March 7, 2013.

Because the aging star is relatively nearby, familiar stars and constellations as seen from Earth are in the sky, but in different locations, as seen in this annotated view.

At upper left is the constellation Orion, which looks distorted from our new perspective in space. 

Just to the upper left of the foreground star is the Pleiades cluster. 

To the lower left of the cluster, our Sun has dimmed to an apparent magnitude of +7, placing it below naked-eye visibility.