Oddball Milky Way's neighboring star cluster may be almost as ancient as the universe.

The age of the globular star cluster M92 has been estimated at 13.8 billion years, plus or minus 0.75 billion years, using a new technique that generated model star clusters and compared them with observations of 18,000 of M92's stars. This almost exactly matches the estimated age of the universe, which may force us to rethink our estimates of the universe's age. M92 is a favorite object for amateur astronomers and a candidate for the oldest globular cluster in our near vicinity. The paper is published in the Astrophysical Journal, and a preprint is available on ArXiv.org.