The Hubble space telescope has enabled astronomers to identify the oldest known star whose age we can reliably estimate.

With a birthdate around 14.5 billion years ago and a margin for error of 0.8 billion years (depending on how youthful the star wishes to appear to others), HD 140283 has been given the slightly more memory-friendly name "the Methuselah star", a reference to the oldest person to ever live according to the Bible.

Previous estimates of the star's age had it celebrating it's super sweet sixteen billion but, as NASA points out, the fact that the Universe's age has been calculated at around 13.8 billion presented some obvious problems. The revised estimate and accompanying wiggle room allow for the Methuselah star, cosmology, and stellar physics to carry on coexisting comfortably.

Hubble was useful in achieving this by allowing the astronomers to more accurately measure the distance of the star from Earth using trigonometric parallax—a syllable-heavy way of describing how a star's position appears to change depending on the position of the observer. By comparing observations from opposite points in Hubble's orbit around Earth it was possible to work out a better approximation of the star's distance from us. The distance was then combined with information about the star's intrinsic brightness to estimate its age with around five times the precision.

"You get an age of 14.5 billion years, with a residual uncertainty that makes the star's age compatible with the age of the universe," said Howard Bond of the Space Telescope Science Institute. "This is the best star in the sky to do precision age calculations by virtue of its closeness and brightness."

The star is moving at a speed of 800,000 miles per hour and, NASA explains, will eventually slingshot back to the galactic halo of stars encircling the Milky Way. Currently, however, space enthusiasts can see the star with the help of a pair of binoculars in the constellation of Libra.