Astronomers date back to the exact birthday of the universe

What is the age of the universe? Astronomers have been seeking increasingly accurate estimates of its age for decades. Now, a new research paper based on observational data offers the most accurate estimate yet: 13.77 billion years, giving or taking some interconnected time change of 40 million years.

The ResearchPublished in the Journal of Cosmology and Astrophysical Particle Physics, it analyzed the oldest sources of light in the universe based on data from the Atacama Cosmology Telescope of the Chilean National Science Foundation. The researchers looked at data from the same light sources that came from the European Space Agency’s Planck space satellite, which gathered its own information about the Big Bang remnants between 2009 and 2013. The authors pledged to publish all the data they made that is used to form the basis for their conclusions.

This study comes amid a heated debate among scientists about the age of the universe, and much of it remains unresolved. For one thing, there is a The so-called “Methuselah Star” It appears to be about 16 billion years old, which posed a problem for scientists who believed at the time the great explosion It occurred between 12 billion and 14 billion years ago. By 2013, scientists had revised its age to 14.5 billion years, based on new data, which could link the star at roughly the same age as the universe.

In July, scholars published an article in a newspaper The Astronomical Journal This indicates that the age of the universe may reach 12.6 billion years.

Now, this new study appears to coincide with the results of the Planck satellite, which is good news in terms of trying to reach scientific consensus.

“We have now come up with an answer that Planck and ACT agree on,” Simone Aiola, researcher at the Flatiron Institute’s Center for Computational Astrophysics and first author of one of two papers, He said to Cornell University. “It speaks to the fact that these difficult measurements are reliable.”

The Big Bang ModelProposed by Belgian physicist and astronomer George Lumeter for the first time in 1927, he suggests that the universe existed as a single, dense, hot spot in space before it expanded at the speed of light (and at first, faster) there is ample evidence pointing to this theory, including the observation that all Objects not associated with gravity in space are moving away from all other bodies as if they were in the expanding universe; Likewise, distant objects move faster.

Our solar system is thought to have originated roughly 4.6 billion years ago, which means that even by the most generous estimates, it is still less than half the life of the universe itself.

Although using the word “explosion” could mean an explosion, scientists believe that the universe was already in a state of continuous expansion. The “blowout” is believed to be a sudden burst of expansion, or inflation, that has increased in size at least 90 times while continuing to grow exponentially. When these things happened, the universe released large amounts of light and microwave radiation, many of which still exist in the universe today. This cosmic microwave background is visible to microwave detectors, and thus allows scientists to learn more about early periods in the history of our universe.