NASA Reveals Old Photo Showing Age of Universe

This 9-year-old image collected by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope reveals a patch containing the oldest burnt-out star in our entire galaxy. These white dwarfs individually provide a means of assessing the age of the Universe that goes beyond studying ever-accelerating cosmic expansion.

White dwarfs are the helium-burning cores of Sun-like stars that reached the end of their burning cycles. They can endure for billions of years after their progenitors have been destroyed, astronomers say. What's remarkable about them is that they can be used as means of studying cosmic ages.

This particular batch of white dwarfs is important because it contains objects that are between 12 and 13 billion years old. This implies that they formed about 1 billion years or so after the Big Bang. The Milky Way itself only formed about 4 billion years after the Universe first exploded into being.

Astronomers can use this information to calculate the exact age of the entire Cosmos with a great degree of precision, without having to take into account studies of distant Type Ia supernovae.