Age of the Universe Determined with More Accuracy

The most widely accepted astronomical theory on the origins of the Universe at this point says that everything exploded into being following an initial collision of elementary particles. This event, known as the Big Bang, was massive, and released a lot of energy and light. Some of the photons that were emitted during the first moments after the Big Bang have remained to this day in the Universe, permeating all of its corners. They are called the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB), and they can provide astrophysicists with details of how old the Cosmos is. With new satellite measurements, this age, previously estimated to be of 13,7 billion years, was refined even further, Wired reports.

On January 26, six new scientific papers were published online in the journal arXiv, all of them producing new science based on the first seven years of data taken by NASA’s Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WAMP) satellite. In addition to providing the means necessary to recalculate the age of the Universe, the new data sets also helped with the direct detection of primordial helium gas, and allowed scientists to determine one of the primordial traits in the inflation model.

According to this theory, the Universe took between ten and 33 seconds to inflate from a subatomic scale to the size of a soccer ball. This model helps explain the behavior of everything around us particularly well, and the new WAMP data supports the idea that CMB variations over large spatial scales should be more pronounced than those occurring at smaller scales. “This is a really strong endorsement for the theory,” Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab) physicist Scott Dodelson says of the find.

But the most important use of the new WAMP data was the creation of a more refined model to pin down the actual age of the Universe. Through analysis of the CMB, Princeton University expert David Spergel and Johns Hopkins University scientist Charles Bennett were able to conclude that the Cosmos was formed 13.75 billion years ago, with a margin for error of 0.11 billion. This is an improvement from existing figures, which show that the Universe is 13.73 billion years old (-/+0.12 billion years). The previous estimate was based on only five years of WAMP data, whereas the new one had two extra years of observations to rely on.