Study: Universe 13 Billion Years Old

AP | Wednesday, April 24, 2002; 4:21 PM | Paul Recer

[InvisibleChurch]

what's an appropriate present for a 13 billion year old?

[thrcanbonly1]

A billion here a billion there, soon you will be talking about some real time

[longshadow]

what's an appropriate present for a 13 billion year old?

A bottle of Scotch 20 years older??????

;-\

[longshadow]

Signing off for the night.....

[Reaganwuzthebest]

Great post longshadow. Take it up again tomorrow.

[apochromat]

I guess they are relying on image processing algorithms. If the light from the bright dwarves is subtracted from the light of the faint dwarves, large areas of image (larger than the bright dwarves alone) would become unusable. I think it wouldn't necessarily work too well if the faintest dwarves are in the center of the cluster, and it would be less effective for a larger cluster, otherwise the larger cluster could give better results.

[Joe Hadenuf]

Knowing the age of the universe is important, if there actually is an age to it. More importantly however, I think the question, where did if come from, and where does it end, or does it? Lets say we know for a fact, that the Universe is exactly 13 billion years, 9 months, 13 days, 6hours, 2 minutes and 16 seconds old.

This will still not tell us how the universe got here. It may help in the investigation, but it will not tell us the important question of, where did it come from?

[avenir]

Why don't we ever hear a modern scientist say this: “The silence of these infinite spaces terrifies me”?

Pascal trembled at the immensity of the universe and saw no point apart from God. Modern scientists can guess all they want (and who can disprove their claims...after all, no one who existed x-billion years ago is here to disprove them).

The next thing I want to hear from a scientist is that, after having seen the immensity of the universe, they fell on their faces before the Living God who WAS there whenever earth was created.

[WRhine]

I think part of the problem is how does one measure time? Does time run at the same rate now as it did when the universe was first created? We already know time is relative concept, not a constant. We also know that time is warped around mass and progressively slows the greater a mass is. When scientists talk billions of years of time and try to relate it to our time in this solar system there could be huge discrepancies and numerous paradoxes.

[apochromat]

It's evident that this method is better suited for setting a lower limit on the age, given all the standard physics assumptions, than an upper limit. I'm still skeptical of the "found the faintest one" concept. I'm not even so sure that clusters weren't produced until a fairly long time after the "big bang", or that light isn't reddening due to the expansion of space beyond the effect of recession. Obviously, if the rate of expansion and recession were the same, it wouldn't have been much of a bang.

[PatrickHenry]

Could it even be possible to discover galaxies 100 billion or more light years away?

I's possible, yes. But two preconditions would have to be met: (1) such galaxies would have had to exist 100 billion years ago; because (2) the universe would have to be at least 100 billion years old, so that the light from such galaxies would have had time to get to us.

[Physicist]

Maybe it's just me, but I see a lot of contradiction here.

I don't. Assuming the error estimates were done honestly, they will not all overlap. Statistically, we would expect approximately 2/3 of all measurements to include the correct value, and 1/3 of the measurements not to. Do a weighted average of the independent numbers, and then do a chi-squared. You might find that the agreement between them is suspiciously good.

[Physicist]

You can measure till the sun goes down, it's still all theories.

Uh, you do understand the difference between a measurement and a theory, don't you?

[Reaganwuzthebest]

There are things going on in space that sometimes defy natural law, they occur when all conventional wisdom says that they should not be. Here's an example of what I'm trying to say.

[Reaganwuzthebest]

Yes I understand the difference between measurement and theory, but the scientists are only measuring what they can see. Do you think it's posssible the universe bends at some point, like a road meaning that stars and galaxies go on forever, but we can't detect them? If the universe stops where the last stars we see about 13+ billion light years away, then we must be contained in something would you agree, similar to the gravastar theory?

I don't think that's the case, I think space is eternity. But anything's possible, which is why I'm skeptical of claims like the ones being made in this article. There's too much to know yet before drawing these sorts of conclusions.

[Doctor Stochastic]

Why do you find inifnite spaces terrifying? Maybe glorious or wonderful or beautiful, but not terrifying.

[Physicist]

Do you think it's posssible the universe bends at some point, like a road meaning that stars and galaxies go on forever, but we can't detect them?

The universe does bend, but unlike a road, the light bends along with it.

If the universe stops where the last stars we see about 13+ billion light years away, then we must be contained in something would you agree, similar to the gravastar theory?

The universe does not have a boundary. If you think in two dimensions, for a moment, it could be akin to the surface of the Earth: there could be a finite amount of space, but you could travel infinitely in any direction, if you wanted to.

I don't think that's the case, I think space is eternity.

Space may or may not be infinite, but in the first place, the amount of "stuff" we can in principle travel to (which is what I mean when I talk about the "universe") is demonstrably finite, and the "stuff" we can see is of finite age. Look out into the universe, and you see that it was a very different place 10 billion years ago.

But anything's possible,

That's just it. Some things are possible, but not just anything. At its core, the universe behaves according to one set of universal laws. Even in the complete absence of theory, our measurements have constrained pretty severely what those laws might be. We don't know nothing.

[Physicist]

There are things going on in space that sometimes defy natural law, they occur when all conventional wisdom says that they should not be. Here's an example of what I'm trying to say.

Don't be fooled by the overblown rhetoric of a journalist. Physicists are always waiting expectantly for the latest violation of muon g-2. If you read the FR discussions here and here, you'll find my explanations of the significance of muon g-2 violation, and why we expect such violations to appear.

The muon g-2 result hardly turns physics on its head. We've always known that the standard model of particle physics is incomplete. What the measurement does is pare down the myriad extensions to the standard model that are floating around out there. At most one of those theories is correct. In any case, is highly unlikely that the correct model will overthrow much of what we already believe we know about particle physics.