About M67

M67 is one of the oldest known open clusters, and by far the oldest of Messier's open clusters, being aged at 3.2 billion years in the Star Catalog 2000; Mallas/Kreimer quote an even higher, but probably outdated value of 10 billion years. New estimates of G. Meynet's Geneva Team indicate an age of 4.0 billion years. Note: This is still less than the age of our Solar System, but open clusters usually get destructed much faster. It has been calculated that M67 can expect to exist as a cluster for about another 5 billion years.