An Older, Larger Universe

Josh Fink writes "Space.com has a very interesting article as part their weekly mystery Monday series about a new calculation that shows that the Universe is actually much older than than the 14.3 billion years old that was established in 2003. From the article, "...the universe is instead about 15.8 billion years old and about 180 billion light-years wide." The calculations were based off of a recalculation of the Hubble Constant which dictates how fast the universe is expanding, and they found it is actually 15% slower than previously thought. The findings will be printed in an upcoming edition of Astrophysical Journal."

What is...

[by Anonymous Coward]

1.5 billion year between friends? She's still under 18.0 billion, so be careful! :/

Yea, but what's outside

[bblazer (757395)]

Those are some huge numbers. What gets me going though is what is outside of those 180 billion light years of width? What happens when you hit the border? Is there a passport checkpoint?

Re:Yea, but what's outside

[tsa (15680)]

How can it be 180 billion light years wide and just 15.8 billion years old? If the Big Bang theory AND Einsteins theory that nothing can go faster than light are both correct, the universe can only be 15.8 * 2 = 31.6 billion light years wide. I am a lowly nanotechnologist, and for them everything bigger than a mm is HUGE, so the size of the universe is incomprehensible beyond imagination to me. Can anyone with more knowledge about the universe elaborate on this?

Re:Yea, but what's outside

[Skynet (37427)]

The expansion of space isn't governed by the speed of light.

Re:Yea, but what's outside

[rucs_hack (784150)]

Nothing can travel faster then the speed of light, universal expansion isn't the same thing as light speed.

The universe is expanding away from us in all directions. Well, it's expanding at every point.

So it is possible for a photon of light which started it's life at the opposite end of the universe when the universe was much smaller then it is now, to have not yet reached us, and indeed for it to never reach us, because of the universes expansion. No matter how far it travels, we will always be out of reach, and accelerating. Note I am ignoring the concept of the big crunch here, as it's an unproven concept.

However we are not travelling faster then the speed of light, even though we stay out of reach, what's happening is that the universe in which the speed of light is a constant is itself increasing in size. Thus the distance this imaginary photon must cover to reach us keeps getting larger.

Re:Yea, but what's outside

[dpilot (134227)]

Some time read, "The Day The Universe Changed," by James Burke. http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0316117048/002-07 01003-8544823?v=glance&n=283155 [amazon.com] or http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Day_the_Universe_ Changed [wikipedia.org]

Just because Einstein turned Newtonian physics on its ear doesn't make Newton any less of a genius. Whenever Einstein is superceded, it won't make him less of a genious, either. It just means that someone else has stood on his shoulders, like he stood on Newton's, and has seen even further.

Newton and Einstein both "changed the Universe" because they changed how we view it and how we relate to it. Or the example Burke uses is Galileo, and how he shifted the center of the Universe from the Earth to the Sun. (I know you could argue that it was really Copernicus, and that neither was really correct.)

Re:Yea, but what's outside

[CosmeticLobotamy (155360)]

From the link in the article:
Need a visual? Imagine the universe just a million years after it was born, Cornish suggests. A batch of light travels for a year, covering one light-year. "At that time, the universe was about 1,000 times smaller than it is today," he said. "Thus, that one light-year has now stretched to become 1,000 light-years."

Which is one of the many reasons I consider any science that hasn't gone into producing a working television at least 95% bullshit.

That question is meaningless

[BlackCobra43 (596714)]

Just like "What came before there was time". Without a frame of reference, words like "beyond" or "before" become meaningless. You might as well ask what lies "beyond" the point you see on a cartesian plane.

Re:Yea, but what's outside

[D-Cypell (446534)]

What happens when you hit the border? Is there a passport checkpoint?

It is probably biometrics now but who cares when there is so much to do in this universe. Infact, anyone who wants to leave this universe is clearly unpatriotic anyway.

Re:Yea, but what's outside

[Promodeus (993697)]

It depends on the shape of the universe... If you think of an Omega constant less or equal than 1, it's either flat or convex, in wich case the frontier diverges... if, on the other hand, it's more than one, you could have your spheric universe. Another missconception, AFAIK, is withe the "outside of it". The universe, by definition, is existence itself, in the form of time-space. There can't be an outside because there is no existence there, not even the absence of matter... Yeap, this is the place when phisics turn philosophers...

Re:Yea, but what's outside

[Promodeus (993697)]

Exactly. It's creating it as it goes... Mindboggling, isn't it? Now that's it but just on theory... other theories that I'm not so familiar with (and at an absolute amateurish level) speculate about expansion over some other spatial coordinates that the 3D we know of. Imagine acid over a polystirene cone, eating it at a symetric rate (or perhaps not so much)... Our universe would be just this surface expanding, and it expands its borders over another spatial dimention unthinkable to the flat universe dudes (us).

Redshift in Light Constant?

[eldavojohn (898314)]

The Hubble Constant [wikipedia.org] is based on the idea that the redshift of spectrum of light reveals how quickly it is moving away from you. Similar to the Doppler effect with sound.

I am not a physicist but I recall another article [slashdot.org] that speculated that light may not always have traveled at the same speed. If this is true and we are measuring light that is ~90 billion years old, doesn't this drastically effect the red light shift that is so dependent on the constant of the speed of light?

They didn't go into detail in the article except that it is a new recalculation using a pair of stars instead of a single star. I do not believe this alleviates the problem of possible change in constants regarding light and its redshift, however.

Old

[HugePedlar (900427)]

As long as it's still older than 6000 years I'm happy.

180B years wide but only 15B years old?

[192939495969798999 (58312)]

So if it's 180B light-years wide, but 15B years old, does that mean that on average, if it started as a singularity, it has expanded at 10x the speed of light since the beginning of time?(tm) Do I get the Nobel prize in physics now?

Wow its changed again

[Crashmarik (635988)]

Cosmologists have to be the weathermen of astronomy. Every five to ten years they come up with their definitive measurements of the (age,shape,nature, ending,begining pick one or more) universe. Once they have settled into an attractive basin they defend the viewpoint religously and then in five to ten years it happens all over again. If you catch a cosmologist between shifts they act as if the current viewpoint is the be all and end all.

15B years, 180B light-years... RTFA (here)

[scovetta (632629)]

(from: http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/mystery_mond ay_040524.html [space.com])

This article generated quite a few e-mails from readers who were perplexed or flat out could not believe the universe was just 13.7 billion years old yet 158 billion light-years wide. That suggests the speed of light has been exceeded, they argue. So SPACE.com asked Neil Cornish to explain further. Here is his response:

"The problem is that funny things happen in general relativity which appear to violate special relativity (nothing traveling faster than the speed of light and all that).

"Let's go back to Hubble's observation that distant galaxies appear to be moving away from us, and the more distant the galaxy, the faster it appears to move away. The constant of proportionality in that relationship is known as Hubble's constant.

"One seemingly paradoxical consequence of Hubble's observation is that galaxies sufficiently far away will be receding from us at a velocity faster than the speed of light. This distance is called the Hubble radius, and is commonly referred to as the horizon in analogy with a black hole horizon.

"In terms of special relativity, Hubble's law appears to be a paradox. But in general relativity we interpret the apparent recession as being due to space expanding (the old raisins in a rising fruit loaf analogy). The galaxies themselves are not moving through space (at least not very much), but the space itself is growing so they appear to be moving apart. There is nothing in special or general relativity to prevent this apparent velocity from exceeding the speed of light. No faster-than-light signals can be sent via this mechanism, and it does not lead to any paradoxes.

"Indeed, the WMAP data [on cosmic microwave background radiation] contain strong evidence that the very early universe underwent a period of accelerated expansion in which the distance been two points increased so quickly that light could not outrace the expansion so there was a true horizon -- in precise analogy with a black hole horizon. Indeed, the fluctuations we see in the CMB are thought to be generated by a process that is closely analogous to Hawking radiation from black holes.

"Even more amazing is the picture that emerges when you combine the WMAP data with [supernova] observations, which imply that the universe has started inflating again. If this is true, we have started to move away from the distant galaxies at a rate that is increasing, and in the future we will not be able to see as many galaxies as they will appear to be moving away from us faster than the speed of light (due to the expansion of space), so their light will not be able to reach us."

The 180B light years is a MINIMUM size

[wisebabo (638845)]

I believe that the 180B light years is just a MINIMUM, that is the universe could actually be much much larger. The 180B lyrs. would the minimum size that would be allowable under our current measurements (for example the cosmic background radiation) that dictate how much the universe grew as a result of "inflation". It it were smaller than that, we would start to see "reflections" of ourselves as the light in the universe would have gone all the way around like in a hall of mirrors (and we could see the earth of a long time ago!).

To illustrate how big the universe could be there was, I think, an interesting article (set of articles?) in Scientific American that described the various ways in which we would could have a "parallel (viewable) universe" to our own. One was the idea that the whole universe was so huge that if you went far enough you could find an exact same configuration of all of the particles that we can see in our own viewable (~30B lyr wide) universe.

Of course this would mean that the actual universe would be so unbelievably gigantic that 180B lyr. would be an unimaginably tiny speck within it!

15% Slower

[Anne_Nonymous (313852)]

> the universe is...about 180 billion light-years wide...and 15% slower

Yeah well, I'm a little wider and a bit slower each year too.

Erdos joke

[rothlmar (982182)]

The prolific mathematician Paul Erdos, towards the end of his life, used to say that he was about four billion years old. He explained: when he was a boy, the known of the age of the universe was about five billion years, but by the time he was older, the age of the universe was had grown to nine billion. Tack on another billion and change for all of us...

The real age of the Universe discovered!

[dzfoo (772245)]

AP 08/07/2006, Jordan - In related news, a new scroll has been uncovered in the Dead Sea that categorically insists that God most definitely did *NOT* rest on the seventh day, and perhaps worked on the Creation at least half-way through the next week. The Universe is now believed to be 9 1/2 days old; a full 3 days older than originally thought.

        -dZ.

Misleading, sensational article

[StupendousMan (69768)]

This whole article is misleading. The new research has very little to do with our knowledge of the size and age of the universe.

(And, yes, I am an astronomer).

Stanek and company have used measurements of one eclipsing binary system to determine the distance to M33. This is a good way to measure distances, as it avoids the perils of even a short "ladder" of methods. They find a distance modulus of 24.92 +/- 0.12 mag to the binary. You can read their paper on astro-ph at

http://xxx.lanl.gov/abs/astro-ph?papernum=0606279 [lanl.gov]

Go to Table 7 of their paper, in which they compare their distance to previous measurements. There are 12 previous values, measured by several techniques (only 2 of the papers use Cepheids). The range of those previous values is 24.32 +/- 0.45 to 24.86 +0.07/-0.11. Their new distance is inconsistent, at the 1-sigma level, with 6 of the 12 others; thus, it is consistent with 6 of the 12 others.

Yes, it's true that the HST Key Project distance to M33, computed using Cepheids, is smaller than the new distance by an amount well outside the quoted uncertainties. But that's not a big deal, by itself. M33 is only one of a number of galaxies which serves to calibrate secondary distance indicators, which may in turn be used to find the Hubble constant. A small change in the distance to M33, even if true, would not make any major change to H-nought.

Recall that M33 is close enough to us that its radial velocity is NOT caused by the expansion of the universe, but instead by the gravitational forces of the galaxies in the Local Group. The press release's statement

The team's results suggested that the stars were about 3 million light-years from Earth--or about half-a-million light-years farther than would be expected using the commonly accepted Hubble constant value.

is absolute nonsense. One cannot USE the Hubble constant and radial velocity of M33 to calculate its distance. The radial velocity of M33 is -179 km/sec, so "using" the Hubble costant to determine its distance would yield a negative distance. Phht.

This is a very nice, and very very worthwhile scientific project -- I have followed the DIRECT team's efforts for years, and encourage them to keep going! -- but the press release tries too hard to make it into some sort of breakthrough with profound immediate results.

Sigh.

The Hubble Constant and the age of the universe

[tjwhaynes (114792)]

I love it when I see reports like this. Stating that the age of the universe is 15.8 billion years old gives the impression that this is accurate to around 1 percent or better. The error bars on this sort of figure are probably closer to +/- 2 billion years or more, implying that the 99% percentile answer is something in the range 12 - 20 billion years. Most of the "measurements" over the last 20 years fit into that range. There is a tendency for the more recent publications to fall into the 14 - 16 billion year mark and that may simply be a reflection that that is the "accepted" answer.

I actually used to work on a team measuring the Hubble Constant using Radio Telescope data ten years ago - actually the same group who came up with 42 km s-1 Mpc-1 value which caused all the Douglas Adams H2G2 references (that was shortly before I joined). There was a lot of controversy over the value of the Constant back then and it is still a hot topic. Back then, the Hubble Constant was thought to have values anywhere from 30 km s-1 Mpc-1 up to 120 km s-1 Mpc-1 . The smaller the value of the Hubble Constant, the older the Universe is. Having a smaller value was desirable because it meant that the Universe was old enough to account for the oldest objects observed (about 16 billion years old). Think about that.

One of the points that struck me then was that the value of the Hubble Constant measured tended to be higher when measured using "more local" techniques and tended to be lower as techniques using more distant measurements were used. The Radio Telescope information gave us measurements based on object around or beyond a redshift of 1 (or, to put it another way, these clusters of galaxies observered were about half the age of the universe when the light left them).

Anyway, we'll be seeing more measurements of the Hubble Constant for many more years. Just remember the error bars!

Cheers,
Toby Haynes

Accuracy of the Hubble Constant measurements

[tjwhaynes (114792)]

No, the startling thing about recent cosmological work is that we do know this number to ~percent. The flagship for this new "precision cosmology" are the WMAP results. The number is weighing in at 13.7+/-0.2 billion years. Take a look at the tables of cosmological parameters in this paper and the carefully calculated error bars.

Chewing through that paper (interesting one by the way) shows that those error bars are based on analysis of the data after processing. Therefore, those error bars on the age of the universe are assuming that the removal of foreground sources and fluctuations due to the Sunyaev Zel'dovich effect have been done absolutely correctly. No attempt (that I can see) has been made to model the errors arising from that procedure. That alone suggests that there are systematic effects which are not accounted for in those results.

I'm extremely sceptical of a lot of error bars on a lot of data. Confusion is a huge topic in radio astronomy (and I don't mean the chaotic, running-around, headless-chicken type of confusion) and I see paper after paper that really doesn't understand it, deal with it or present any full explanation of how errors in confusion analysis would propagate into the answers.

Cheers,
Toby Haynes

Its not the size of the boat...

[ExE122 (954104)]

I don't want to get flamed by saying people are asking dumb questions, but everyone just needs to stop relying on simple arithmetic when dealing with the size of space... The concepts involved are far more complicated than that.

One thing people don't seem to be grasping is that with the Big Bang model, the size of the universe isn't measured by the distance between two particles floating on the "edge". It is actually a measure of the width of the "fabric" of the known universe, space-time. Its difficult to grasp this since it is not something easily perceived.

The real reason for the size of the universe being so much larger is that the laws governing the size of space-time are not the same as the laws of spacial relativaty, and therefore are not constrained to the upper bound of the speed of light.

The best analogy that I've heard is the ant on the balloon example. The idea is that you picture an ant sitting on a balloon with a bread crumb an inch away. If you were to blow up the balloon to twice its size, the bread crumb wouldn't necessarily move to a distance of two inches from the ant.

In this example, we are the ants and we are watching the galaxies, represented by the bread crumb, moving away from us. However, the fabric of existence is expanding at a much larger rate.

The "what's beyond the edge" question is essentially a pointless question when dealing with space-time. There is no "edge" because nothing can possibly exist outside of the realm of spacetime.

And if that concept doesn't satisfy the question, then a simple-minded answer would be that an "edge" can never be reached as space-time is always expanding faster than any particle could possibly hope to keep up with it.

--
"A man is asked if he is wise or not. He replies that he is otherwise" ~Mao Zedong

Re:180 billion light-years wide

[Gunfighter (1944)]

How did they figure that out

Triangulation?