The universe is almost 14 billion years old

From an observatory above Chile’s Atacama Desert, astronomers have taken a fresh look at the oldest light in the universe.

Their observations, plus a little cosmic geometry, suggest that the universe is 13.77 billion years old – roughly 40 million years old. A Cornell University researcher co-authored one of two papers on the findings, which add a new twist to an ongoing debate in the astrophysical community.

The new estimate, using data collected at the National Science Foundation’s Atacama Cosmology Telescope (ACT), matches that provided by the Standard Model of the Universe, along with measurements of the same light made by the Planck satellite from the ‘European Space Agency, which measured remains of the Big Bang from 2009 to 2013.

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

The principal 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, College of Arts and Sciences.

In 2019, a research team measuring the movements of galaxies calculated that the universe is hundreds of millions of years younger than what Planck’s team predicted. This discrepancy suggested that a new model for the universe might be needed and raised concerns that one of the measurement sets might be incorrect.

“We have now found an answer that Planck and ACT agree on,” said Simone Aiola, a researcher at the Center for Computational Astrophysics at the Flatiron Institute and first author of one of the two papers. “It shows that these difficult measurements are reliable.”