Astronomers Agree: Universe Is Nearly 14 Billion Years Old (phys.org) 86
Astronomers have taken a new look at the oldest light in the universe, which suggests that the universe is 13.77 billion years old -- give or take 40 million years. Phys.Org reports: The new estimate, using data gathered at the National Science Foundation's Atacama Cosmology Telescope (ACT), matches the one provided by the standard model of the universe, as well as measurements of the same light made by the European Space Agency's Planck satellite, which measured remnants of the Big Bang from 2009 to '13. The research was published in the Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics.
The lead author of "The Atacama Cosmology Telescope: A Measurement of the Cosmic Microwave Background Power Spectra at 98 and 150 GHz" is Steve Choi, NSF Astronomy and Astrophysics Postdoctoral Fellow at the Cornell Center for Astrophysics and Planetary Science, in the College of Arts and Sciences. In 2019, a research team measuring the movements of galaxies calculated that the universe is hundreds of millions of years younger than the Planck team predicted. That discrepancy suggested a new model for the universe might be needed and sparked concerns that one of the sets of measurements might be incorrect. "Now we've come up with an answer where Planck and ACT agree," said Simone Aiola, a researcher at the Flatiron Institute's Center for Computational Astrophysics and first author of one of two papers. "It speaks to the fact that these difficult measurements are reliable."
The lead author of "The Atacama Cosmology Telescope: A Measurement of the Cosmic Microwave Background Power Spectra at 98 and 150 GHz" is Steve Choi, NSF Astronomy and Astrophysics Postdoctoral Fellow at the Cornell Center for Astrophysics and Planetary Science, in the College of Arts and Sciences. In 2019, a research team measuring the movements of galaxies calculated that the universe is hundreds of millions of years younger than the Planck team predicted. That discrepancy suggested a new model for the universe might be needed and sparked concerns that one of the sets of measurements might be incorrect. "Now we've come up with an answer where Planck and ACT agree," said Simone Aiola, a researcher at the Flatiron Institute's Center for Computational Astrophysics and first author of one of two papers. "It speaks to the fact that these difficult measurements are reliable."
Billion (Score:3)
Is that an imperial billion or a metric billion?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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Is that an imperial billion or a metric billion?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Well, according to a planet full of religions ironically counting in lockstep, I'd say it's more of a spiritual, creative billion.
All 2021 of them.
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Is that an imperial billion or a metric billion?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
No one has used what you're calling the "Imperial" billion in English for about a hundred years. Whether France or other countries use the word this way I don't know but in any case it would not be "Imperial".
Wikipedia is, as usual, a pile of half-arsed shite.
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Wikipedia is, as usual, a pile of half-arsed shite.
If you'd like point out which part of that page is incorrect then we can easily fix it for you.
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No one has used what you're calling the "Imperial" billion in English for about a hundred years.
The Wikipedia page has a reference to the House Of Commons Library that changed in 1974. That's in England, where English comes from.
Also where you come from judging from your parlance and irrational hatred of the French.
So ... if anything is full of "half-arsed shite" around here, it might be you.
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Well I can remeber going to a seminar about heavy metals in the environment less than 50 years ago, and the head research guy referred to so many PPB's , and added "American Billions" (This was in New Zealand) so British Billions (10 to the 12th) must have been a thing back then.
In that system, 10 to the 9 is a Milliard
and I suppose 10 to the 15 would be a Billiard
Not sure where a snooker comes in
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I read a piece by JM Keynes written in the 1920s where he pauses to clarify that he's not using the "old" British billion. In 56 years of living in Britain I have never seen anyone use the 10^12 meaning except to explain that it's not what they are using.
The British Billion died out more than a century ago and lives on only as a clarification - exactly as your NZ example was doing.
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The universe prefers to think of itself as 14 billion years young
Also, we shouldn't anthropomorphize the universe. It doesn't like it.
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Unless they were funded by Segate.
It suggests ONLY .... (Score:3, Insightful)
... the oldest light we can measure. That might not necessarily be the age of the entire universe. Dark matter might be even older.
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Oh great, now you "invented" dark time.
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Pretty sure we had seen dark times before. The whole year 2020 was a dark time.
I hope we'll put those behind us with the year 2021 here.
Re:It suggests ONLY .... (Score:5, Interesting)
Its almost certainly one and the same. The curvature of space very strongly implies theres no "before" that.
Thats a hetrodox claim at best. We have *no fucking idea* what Dark matter is, let alone any sort of history of it. We have some strong hints as to some of its characteristics, one of which is that it obeys gravity, which implies an embeddedness common to other matter, which means the idea of it existing "before" the be big bang isn't really coherent.
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Given that:
"We have *no fucking idea* what Dark matter is, let alone any sort of history of it. "
Maybe we shouldn't be tossing out phrases like "almost certainly" all fast and loose like that when we know we don't know enough to have a high certainty of anything other than thought our system of calculation is pushing its limits as a tool to explain everything.
Re: It suggests ONLY .... (Score:2)
So, no, then?
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In my experience the dense trolls tend to be the people running about contributing nothing but ridicule and ad hominems.
And it wasn't trolling, twas good old fashioned humor dumbass.
Re:It suggests ONLY .... (Score:4, Informative)
Yeah I'm gonna assume you don't have much familiarity with the topic lol.
We don't know what Dark matter is, but we DO know to a very high degree of certainty what its properties are, specifically that it responds to gravity. In fact that is why we even talk about it in the first place.
Certain things follow from that, specifically that it has a mass, that its a thing in the universe and thus its highly unlikely to come from a 'before". (Especially since if time starts at the big bang, talking about "before" is kind of nonsense. How do you have a "before" when there is no time.).
There are some alternatives, notably modified gravity theories which draw minor interest from physicists from time to time, but these are 100% at conflict of any sort of claim of some sort of *stuff* that existed "before" the big bang.
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I like to compare Dark Matter to shadows...
Imagine for a moment that we didn't know what sunlight was and how shadows are created by light. People will look at their shadows and wonder why these look like humans, why we cannot talk to them and how these keep following us around. We would wonder if shadows had a life of their own, and what they do when we look away, why they sometimes disappear and where do they go to.
It seems silly at first, but it is pretty much what we do when we talk about Dark Matter. W
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We don't know what Dark matter is, but we DO know to a very high degree of certainty what its properties are
Properties? Plural?
specifically that it responds to gravity
Yes. we all know about "that" property. What other properties does it have? The rest of us who are not able to dedicate our lives to the pursuit of science are a bit curious about what other properties Dark Matter has. To the general public, it is described as something that has to do with gravity and ... absolutely nothing else.
From a rational (supposedly) but untrained point of view, it is logically impossible for Dark Matter to even exist. All mass interacts with the electromagnetic sp
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Yes. In the plural sense of the term.
We know
1) That it interacts to gravity.
2) That it does not interact with the EM force.
We also know it seems to bunch up in galaxies and in 'filaments' around the universe.
And not much beyond that. But its definately plural.
Nonsense.
Neutrinos do not appear to have a magnetic moment, o
14.17 ~ 13.77 (Score:1)
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Using eyes, or a telescope. Duh. QM effects are irrelevant.
The universe is not crystalized, nor has it been, nor shall it.
Obviously.
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Dark matter might be even older.
Sure, for some extremely low value of "might".
(somewhere in the ballpark of pigs evolving wings)
Re: It suggests ONLY .... (Score:2)
"The entire universe" is a nonsensical and useless term.
Since our universe will only ever be what we see (and saw).
Reality is relative. Modern science does not deal in absolutes.
("Absolute zero" temperature is merely a mathematical trick, by the way. Any infinity/infinitiessimal can be turned into a hypothetical limit of zero.)
As far as we know, it is literally physically impossible for anything outside our light cone to infuence us, so for all that is sane, it is not in out universe, and statements about i
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... the oldest light we can measure. That might not necessarily be the age of the entire universe.
No, it simply means the time since the big bang, in something like our reference frame.
The oldest "light" is the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB), which is from approximately 379,000 years later.
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That's not how it works; everything is older than the oldest light we can measure because the oldest light only marks the moment when the universe became transparent. Everything before that, the period during which the universe was opaque, is derived from a model. The model predicts that there's about 380000 years between the Big Bang and the end of the opaque period. Obviously, we can probably never prove that, but since the model very precisely predicts many different aspects of the state of the universe,
This time around... (Score:2)
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What's the meaning of time and period outside the Universe?
It seems like the question is only meaningful is time is a consistent feature from one "incarnation" of the Universe to the next.
Re: This time around... (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, the last before us, time wise, likely is our anti-universe, with time flowing backwards, and hence its matter being anti-matter to us. (*There* is where it all went!)
The thing with the flow of time is, that entropy getting bigger is the only way we can tell which direction is the future and is the only reason we only remember the past. (There's a nice PBS SpaceTime episode series about that.)
So you'd need to ask what entropy does, "outside" of the greater universe/multiverse. Right after you defined "outside". :)
religious nuts dont like that sort of theory (Score:1)
Number numbness (Score:4, Funny)
Re: Number numbness (Score:1)
Numbets dumbness, with you, more like.
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I have that book and I taught my kids about the practice of counting the zeros as a rough approximation of big numbers.
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I have that book and I taught my kids about the practice of counting the zeros as a rough approximation of big numbers.
Just use this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
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So good, it makes me kinda uncomfortable to point this out, but...
Earth won't fall into our star in either one million or one billion years... Currently, our best projections of the sun's future are that it will continue to burn as a yellow dwarf for approximately one billion years. Once it burns through it's supply of hydrogen, it will become a red giant, burning helium.
That "red giant" will be so much larger than the sun is today that its surface will expand tremendously, s
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Both statements are equally true.
Yes, it will be the expansion of the sun, not the decay of Earth's orbit, that will cause the Earth to be engulfed by the sun's atmosphere, but as soon as that happens the resistance of passing through the sun's atmosphere will cause the Earth's orbit to decay and the Earth to fall into the center of the sun. The Earth consists almost entirely of elements that are far heavier than most of the sun, so the Earth will join the sun's core.
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Okay, but I was looking for a joke about the birthday party.
This *version* of the universe is 14G years old (Score:2, Insightful)
There is a mounting belief amongst a lot of cosmologists that the Big Bang was only the beginning of this iteration of the universe and/or we're just another bubble off the multiverse with reality itself being eternal. Which to me makes more sense than it just appearing literally out of nothing.
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Be that as it is, or isn't, and getting to my main point - hold applause - even if this were just another iteration, where did the first one come from?
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For an in-depth look at possible root causes of the universe, one of my personal favorite reads of the past few years has been Katie Mack's "The End of Everything." While it's framed as a discussion of several different theoretical possibilities for how our universe might end, it also discusses how some of those ends could be a beginning, or how our universe may have begun. For as deep as the subject is, she does a great job of keeping it light and entertaining.
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Which to me makes more sense than it just appearing literally out of nothing.
How is an eternal universe not "something from nothing"? It does not do away with the uncaused cause any more than a god does.
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It doesn't require a cause because it never had a beginning. Saying something has no beginning is no more bizarre than saying something arose out of absolutely nothing when even time didn't exist.
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It doesn't require a cause because it never had a beginning.
You are thinking of "cause" as what chronologically precedes an event. That is fine for daily life, but too simplistic and naive for physics.
For one thing, the arrow of time is not a fundamental property of physics - the past and future are indistinguishable, except for entropy at a certain scale. Direction of time is sort of an illusion. Like a road: you may see one direction uphill and one down, but that is just a local effect. You may reach a crest where the direction changes. Or, if you look close eno
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Of course its a problem for physics - unless you think its the realm of religion and philosophy alone. Physics aims to describe reality ie all of it, not just the bits we experience.
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There is a mounting belief amongst a lot of cosmologists that the Big Bang was only the beginning of this iteration of the universe and/or we're just another bubble off the multiverse with reality itself being eternal. Which to me makes more sense than it just appearing literally out of nothing.
So, how come being eternal makes more sense that appearing out of nothing?
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If there was absolutely nothing, how could anything ever come to exist? If something is eternal , possibly time is circular, that question go away. Regardless, the ultimate truth whatever it may be is probably way beyond the comprehension of a human brain.
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And the question of how something is capable of being eternal enters the picture. Eternal is the same as infinite. This means that there are (or were) infinite world exactly as ours, you and me repeated an infinite countable times if matter and space are finite. If they were not finite, then we would have eternal time and eternal and infinite space and matter.
Circular... I don't know. It doesn't make any sense at all, certainly not more that something out of nothing ("actual" nothing in the philosophical s
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Lets be honest, none of the potential answers make sense. But then neither does quantum theory. The true nature of reality is beyond what we can comprehend IMO.
Absolutely nothing implies no rules... (Score:2)
... and with no rules, anything is possible -- even a big bang or whatever else is possible.
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The belief of multiple Big Bangs is indeed spreading. However, it includes that time itself is being bound to the creation, meaning, each iteration takes an infinite amount of time, and at the moment of absolute expansion it "flips around" and creates a new Big Bang where everything including time starts again from a singular point.
This belief is founded on the extrapolation of mathematical formulas describing the current model of the universe. It makes sense when looking at only the formulas, but this does
No, the *results* agree. (Score:2)
This is science. Whether the astronomers agree, is irrelevant.
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"This is science. Whether the astronomers agree, is irrelevant."
Exactly! Also, everybody knew that for decades, who are the 2 astronomers who got convinced this late?
Doesn't look a day over 13B (Score:2)
Looking for the Context (Score:2)
But that seems to be only a *part* of the story here. If we can all agree that the universe originated in the Big Bang and the
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"years" as a unit (Score:2)
How old was the universe before our solar system and the notion of Earth years even existed?
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Well, since the Earth is around 4.5 billion years old the universe would have been around 9 billion at that time. I believe that's using the current value of 'year' though, early in our planet's existence the year may have been considerably shorter until it migrated to its current location.
All guess work (Score:1)
We know of a star that is estimated to be older than the estimated age of the universe.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
It's possible that the two estimates overlap, but it's also possible our methodologies are off in either or both cases.
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"A study published in 2013 used the Fine Guidance Sensors of NASA's Hubble Space Telescope to measure a precise parallax (and therefore distance and luminosity) for the star. This information was used to estimate an age for the star of 14.46 ± 0.8 billion years. Due to the uncertainty in the value, this age for the star may or may not conflict with the calculated age of the Universe as determined by the final 2015 Planck satellite results of 13.799 ± 0.021 billion years."
Th
then why ... (Score:2)
An object traveling the speed of light can't go 93 billion light years in 14 billion years.
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Maybe before the big bang it was already 65 light years long?
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Bullshit (Score:2)
The universe is vastly older than 14 billion years.
Our best estimates today say it takes Sol 250 million years to orbit Sagittarius A* once. If the universe was only 14 billion years old, and if the primordial hydrogen of the big bang had somehow managed to collapse instantly into stars arranged in galaxies, Sol would only have managed to circle Sagittarius A* 56 times. Which is ridiculous.
Astronomers say galaxies are gravitationally-bound structures. Galaxies spin too slowly for us to confirm that by ob
Yet Wired... (Score:2)
...reports "that our Milky Way galaxy came together nearly 14 billion years ago."
This pretty much convinces me that nobody has a definitive answer to the age of the universe, or the age of the Milky Way. It's all speculation.
https://www.wired.com/story/th... [wired.com]
Science versus Religion (Score:2)
Universe is ~14,000,000,000 years old;
Earth is ~4,000,000,000 years old;
Humans are ~200,000 years old;
Religions are ~2000 years old;
"Earth is Flat" --Torah/Bible/Quran/Vedas
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]