COSMOLOGY
JANUARY 12, 2021
The age of the Universe is 13,77 billion years old
Using a powerful telescope in Chile, scientists found that the age of the Universe is 13,77 billion years old.
At the beginning, the entire universe was compacted into a super infinite density. Then it exploded in a massively vast and rapid expansion of energy and radiation which we call it now as the Big Bang – everything that we find today in the entire universe and all matter inside emerged from that initial expansion.
The particles began to form as the baby universe cooled and expanded, starting with hydrogen and then whole atoms. Hydrogen atoms fused into helium atoms, then further fusion in the cores of stars and their explosions formed heavy elements later on.
The evidence for a Big Bang is extensive. With special instruments we can see the ‘afterglow’ of the Big Bang. Human eyes cannot see the light because we only perceive only a very narrow part of electromagnetic spectrum that we call “visible light”. That invisible light is the Cosmic Microwave Background radiation, the glow of the universe. It was discovered in the 1960’s by Robert Wilson and Arno Penzias.
Today, in order to understand the evolution and expansion of the cosmos, scientists develop many techniques to find it out. This is an important factor for scientists to calculate the precise age of universe.
One of them is by looking at fluctuations in the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) – the glow left behind after the Big Bang formed the universe. Using this technique The Atacama Cosmology Telescope (ACT) made the measurement.
The telescope used by researchers to effectively create a triangle in the sky, and they extrapolate the distance between the two points then measured distances between the Earth and two points of interest in the CMB.
Measuring distances gives scientists a sense for how quickly that change is occurring and therefore the age of the universe because the universe is expanding.The new research is detailed in a study published in the Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics.
“Now we’ve come up with an answer where Planck and ACT [Atacama Cosmology Telescope] agree, it speaks to the fact that these difficult measurements are reliable.” Simone Aiola an author of the study.
Scientists have been mired in a debate about how fast the universe is actually expanding — a number known as the Hubble Constant.
Previously the Planck satellite also estimated the age of the universe was 13.77 billion years and it shows that both research is in line, but other methods that measure the distances between stars have dated the universe as significantly younger.
“Now we’ve come up with an answer where Planck and ACT [Atacama Cosmology Telescope] agree, it speaks to the fact that these difficult measurements are reliable.” Simone Aiola a researcher at the Flatiron Institute’s Center for Computational Astrophysics in New York City and first author of one of the new papers on the findings posted to arXiv.org.
The ACT research team is an international collaboration of scientists from 41 institutions in seven countries. The ACT research is funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF). By measuring the oldest light of the universe the ACT team can estimate its age. Other scientific groups estimate the age of universe by taking measurements of galaxies.
Scientists are continuing to gather data and double check their analyses in an attempt to resolve the Hubble Constant conflict. Michael Niemack, an author of the study said “The growing tension between these distant versus local measurements of the Hubble constant suggests that we may be on the verge of a new discovery in cosmology that could change our understanding of how the Universe works.”
Steve Choi of Cornell University, first author of another paper posted to arXiv.org says “I didn’t have a particular preference for any specific value — it was going to be interesting one way or another.” He adds that “We find an expansion rate that is right on the estimate by the Planck satellite team. This gives us more confidence in measurements of the universe’s oldest light.”
While Ethan Siegel an Astrophysicist professor and science communicator explains on forbes.com that Universe is made up, today, of 68% dark energy, 27% dark matter, 4-9% normal matter, about 0.1% neutrinos, about 0.01% radiation, and pretty much nothing else. The number is most precisely from Planck and augmented from others like supernova measurements, HST key project and the Sloan Digital Sky Survey.
From that we can measure the age of Universe is 13.81 billion years old with just 120 million years uncertainty and the accuracy is up to 99.1%.
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