Universe might be 2 billion years younger: study
The universe is expanding much quicker than previously thought, according to researchers in Germany, leading scientists to suggest it may be more than 2 billion years younger than past estimates.
Its age may have to be trimmed to less than 12 billion years, rather than prior projections of 13.8 billion.
Read more: Spectacular insights into the early life of galaxies
Astrophysicists approximate the age of the universe by using the movement of stars to calculate how fast it is expanding. If the universe is expanding faster than previously thought, that means it got to its current size quicker and therefore must be younger.
“We have large uncertainty for how the stars are moving in the galaxy,” said Inh Jee of the Max Planck Institute in Germany and lead author of the study published Thursday in the journal Science.
Past estimates on the universe’s age were based on a Hubble Constant, or expansion rate, of 70. Jee’s team of researchers, however, came up with 82.4, which would put the age of the universe at around 11.4 billion years.
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Hubble’s celestial lightsaber
Better than Star Wars
Just as the new episode of Star Wars hits cinemas, space telescope Hubble took this picture of a cosmic lightsaber. The celestial structure is located about 1,300 light years away. And that’s exactly what it is: the birth of a star system, including some interstellar dust. The space telescope takes breathtaking pictures. Here are some more…
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Hubble’s celestial lightsaber
Eyes in space
Since 1990, the king of all space telescopes has been orbiting earth at a speed of over 17,000 mph (27,000 km/h) and an altitude of 340 miles. Hubble is 11 meters long and weighs 11 tons, making it comparable in weight and size to a school bus.
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Hubble’s celestial lightsaber
Scoping out cosmic bubbles
Hubble has helped us understand the birth of stars and planets, approximate the age of the universe and examine the nature of dark matter. Here we see a gigantic ball of gas created by a supernova explosion.
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Hubble’s celestial lightsaber
Mystical being
The Carina Nebula is one of the most significant open clusters of stars in our galaxy. The colors on this breathtaking photograph aren’t only pretty to look at, however; they also reveal much about the chemical makeup of the gases.
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Hubble’s celestial lightsaber
Fleeting colors
Different gases emit all kinds of different colors. Red, for instance, is a sign of sulfur. Green is hydrogen. And blue is oxygen.
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Hubble’s celestial lightsaber
Hubble needs glasses
The first pictures Hubble sent back were a catastrophe, however, because its main mirror had been ground to the wrong shape. In 1993, Space Shuttle Endeavor took experts to Hubble to fix the problem, giving it a pair of glasses. That was just one of five updates the telescope has received over the years, the last one coming in 2009.
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Hubble’s celestial lightsaber
Space kindergarten
Hubble took this amazing picture in December 2009. The blue dots are very young stars, just a few million years old. This kindergarten of stars is found in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a nearby galaxy, and a satellite of our Milky Way.
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Hubble’s celestial lightsaber
Butterfly?
How about this snapshot from space? Nobody really knows what exactly Hubble had in its lense here, but that doesn’t mean the shot is any less stunning. This image is just one of over 30,000 that Hubble has captured for the ages.
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Hubble’s celestial lightsaber
Divine Sombrero
This virtually transcendent photograph is – like most Hubble images – a composition of many single shots. The Sombrero Galaxy is an unbarred spiral galaxy in the Virgo constellation and is located a mere 28 million light years from the earth.
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Hubble’s celestial lightsaber
Hubble in the flesh
The telescope was named after the American astronomer Edwin Powell Hubble (1889-1953). He was the first person to observe that the universe is expanding, and with it he paved the way for our current cosmological understanding of the Big Bang as initiator of the universe.
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Hubble’s celestial lightsaber
The Pillars of Creation
These column-shaped structures are found in the Eagle Nebula, around 7000 light years away from earth. They were documented by Hubble and have received worldwide recognition under the name “Pillars of Creation.”
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Hubble’s celestial lightsaber
Space smiley
At 25 years and counting, we can all be happy that Hubble will continue to provide us with fascinating images from space. This, by the way, is Hubble’s latest creation – a space smiley! The easy explanation? It was made by bending light.
Large margin of error
However, Jee only used two gravitational lenses for the research, which were all that were available, meaning her margin of error is so large that it’s possible the universe could be older than calculated, not younger.
The limitations has some experts questioning the findings.
Harvard astronomer Avi Loeb told The Associated Press it was an interesting and unique way to work out the universe’s expansion speed, but more information was necessary to add weight to the evidence.
“It is difficult to be certain of your conclusions if you use a ruler that you don’t fully understand,” Loeb said.
Adam Riess, who won a 2011 Nobel Prize for research on the age and expansion rate of the universe, as well as the discovery of “dark energy,” told the Agence France-Press that Thursday’s study lacked accuracy.
“I don’t think this adds much to the present state of affairs. Still, it’s nice to see people look for alternative methods,” he said.
jsi/cmk (AP, AFP)
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