Indirect support for that point of view came from Frédéric Pont of the Geneva Observatory, reporting on a study by a Swiss-French group which combined Hipparcos distances to nearly 1000 elderly stars with detailed analyses of their light from the ground, using a high-precision spectrometer. The results were applied to some of the beautiful globular clusters of stars, which follow independent orbits in the Milky Way Galaxy and contain the oldest lights in the Universe. Estimates of their ages depend critically on their distances, but these are too great even for Hipparcos to measure directly. Instead, astronomers study solitary stars that are both very old and close enough for rangefinding by Hipparcos, and compare them with similar stars in the globular clusters. By this method an Italian team led by Fluvio Fusi Pecci of Bologna Observatory obtained, for example, a distance of 32,000 light-years for the globular cluster M92 in the constellation Hercules. Pont reported that the Swiss-French group preferred a distance of 27,000 light-years, closer to the pre-Hipparcos estimates. This shorter distance to M92, Pont said, added an extra 3-4 billion years to the stars' ages.
Michael Feast and other supporters of the lesser ages were unrepentant,
insisting that they were using the Hipparcos data in an unbiassed,
statistically appropriate way. The arguments became increasingly
technical, because the interpretation of results depends on theories of
how stars burn and evolve. Nobody expected a resolution of the
differences of opinion in the course of the Venice meeting, but a
leading cosmologist, Gustav Tammann of Basel, Switzerland, offered a
positive comment on the debate.
"For me," Tammann said, "the most dramatic result from Hipparcos is that
the distances of the globular clusters increase. So they are
automatically younger, no matter what precise ideas people have about
the evolution of stars. The remaining differences of opinion about the
age of the oldest clusters then depend on the exact models that people
use. As a cosmologist I am happy that the time crisis -- where stars
seemed to be older than the expansion age of the Universe -- seems to
disappear, thanks to Hipparcos."
Patrizia Caraveo from Milan explained to the Venice symposium how she
and her colleagues applied star positions in the Hipparcos and Tycho
Catalogues to calibrate a series of sky images on progressively larger
scales. These culminated in an image from the Planetary Camera in the
Hubble Space Telescope which showed Geminga itself. Never before was the
position of so faint an object so precisely fixed.
"Our aim," Caraveo commented, "was not to break records in astrometry
but to improve our knowledge of the physics of this remarkable neutron
star. Geminga has been observed pulsating for more than 20 years, but
the position of the star in relation to the Earth's motion in orbit
alters the apparent pulsation rate. Knowing Geminga's precise position,
we can correct for that error and measure very accurately a gradual
reduction in Geminga's rate of spin."
ESA will release the catalogues to the world's astronomers in June. Meanwhile astronomers who helped in the mission have had privileged access to the data. At the Hipparcos Symposium in Venice 13-16 May they give their early conclusions in 190 reports, in the form of talks or scientific posters. The results affect many branches of astronomy from asteroids to cosmology, but especially the theories of stellar physics and evolution, because Hipparcos provides, for the first time, accurate distances to many thousands of stars.