Finding the exact age of the Universe is no easy task, as astronomers worldwide could confirm in a heartbeat. A crucial component for assessing this age as accurately as possible is missing – the Hubble constant. Years and years of research have brought astronomers closer to the end result, but until a peer-reviewed result is accepted by the entire scientific community, the dispute rages on.

Basically, the Hubble constant, named after Edwin Hubble, a 20th century astronomer at the Carnegie Institution, is the rate at which the Universe expands. The scientist was the first to hypothesize that everything around us is in a constant state of expansion, driven by the forces that push stars, planets and galaxies further and further apart. Since he made the announcement, a scientific Pandora's box was opened.

Barry Madore, a co-investigator for Carnegie, says that “In the age of precision cosmology one of the key factors in securing the fundamental numbers that describe the time evolution and make-up of our universe is the Hubble constant. Ten percent is simply not good enough. Cosmologists need to know the expansion rate of the universe to as high a precision and as great an accuracy as we can deliver.”

Over the past few years, the constant was reduced to just 10 percent uncertainty, but that was still too large to get an accurate assessment of the age of the Universe. Recently, the levels of uncertainty in thee equations dropped to just three percent, with astronomers and mathematicians hoping to be able to calculate it exactly within the next couple of years, as technology advances.

Finding out this number, estimated to be in the vicinity of 72 kilometers per second per megaparsec, also holds great importance to understanding exactly how heavy the Universe is, as knowing its mass could open up the way for new prediction models on how it turns, acts and interacts with itself.