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How old are we? Debate over the age of the universe just got a bit more complicated | CBC News

Byindianadmin

Jul 18, 2020
How old are we? Debate over the age of the universe just got a bit more complicated | CBC News

It’s a question that has plagued astronomers for decades: How old is the universe and how will it end? Now an international team of scientists using a telescope in Chile believe their new findings help refine measurements.

Using different methods, astronomers are trying to understand how fast the universe is expanding, thus also understanding its current age. But the methods don’t agree, leaving them to wonder whether they truly understand the universe of if there’s new physics yet to be discovered. (NASA/Hubble)

Another telescope is helping us better understand the age of the universe and its future.

Using the Atacama Cosmology Telescope (ACT) in Chile, a group of astronomers say their observations support an earlier estimate as to the age of the universe: 13.77 billion years, give or take 40 million years. Their paper was released on the pre-print publishing service arXiv.org on Wednesday and submitted to the Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics.

The estimate supports observations taken by the European Space Agency’s Planck space telescope in the early 2010s. 

Over the years, there have been other studies that have disputed that number. For example, in 2019, a study published in the journal Science suggested the universe was 11.2 billion years old.

A portion of a new picture of the oldest light in the universe taken by the Atacama Cosmology Telescope. This part covers a section of the sky 50 times the moon’s width, representing a region of space 20 billion light-years across. (ACT Collaboration)

“For a half dozen years, I’d say even more … within the past three years, there has been one conference after another all over the world completely focused on this issue where one group comes up and they say, ‘Oh, this is what we get,’ and the other group comes up and says, ‘This is what we get,” said Richard Bond, co-author of the paper and director of the Canadian Institute for Theoretical Astrophysics at the University of Toronto.

“We call it the Hubble tension.”

Why isn’t there a clear-cut answer?

It all comes down to the methods used to calculate the expansion of the universe.

Stars vs.

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