Universe is almost 14 billion years old

From an observatory high above the Atacama Desert in Chile, astronomers have revisited the oldest light in the universe.

Their observations, plus a bit of cosmic geometry, indicate that the universe is 13.77 billion years old – give or take 40 million years. A Cornell University researcher was co-author of one of two articles on the findings, giving a new twist to an ongoing debate in the astrophysics community.

The new estimate, using data collected from the National Science Foundation’s Atacama Cosmology Telescope (ACT), is consistent with the one provided by the standard model of the universe, as well as measurements of the same light provided by the European Space Agency Planck’s satellite was made, which measured remnants of the big bang from 2009 to ’13.

The research was published in the Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics.

The lead author of “The Atacama Cosmology Telescope: A Measurement of the Cosmic Microwave Background Power Spectra at 98 and 150 GHz” is Steve Choi, NSF Astronomy and Astrophysics Postdoctoral Fellow at the Cornell Center for Astrophysics and Planetary Science, in the College of Arts. and Sciences.

In 2019, a research team measuring the motions of galaxies calculated that the universe is hundreds of millions of years younger than the Planck team predicted. That inconsistency suggested that a new model would be needed for the universe, and caused concern that one of the sets of measurements might be incorrect.

“Now we have an answer where Planck and ACT agree,” said Simone Aiola, a researcher at the Flatiron Institute’s Center for Computational Astrophysics and the first author of one of the two articles. “It speaks to the fact that these difficult measurements are reliable.”