17 ms·

Age of universe at 26.7B years, nearly twice as old as previously believed

285 points by hsnewman 3y ago

scld 3y ago
I'm no scientist, but I'm on team "Inflation didn't happen the way we say it did", so a 2x aged universe sounds good to me :)
mydriasis 3y ago
> Zwicky's tired light theory proposes that the redshift of light from distant galaxies is due to the gradual loss of energy by photons over vast cosmic distances. However, it was seen to conflict with observations. Yet Gupta found that "by allowing this theory to coexist with the expanding universe, it becomes possible to reinterpret the redshift as a hybrid phenomenon, rather than purely due to expansion." Aww, the light needs a little nap. No wonder we ( potentially ) got it wrong...!
- bamfly 3y ago
  Where's the energy going, supposedly? I'd assumed "the light's losing energy" had been firmly ruled out long ago—it was a potential explanation that occurred to me the very first time I heard about the observed red shift of distant galaxies, so I figured it must be very and obviously wrong if I'd never heard an actual physicist even mention the possibility of that as a notable factor. [EDIT] Wikipedia "Tired Light" article: > The concept was first proposed in 1929 by Fritz Zwicky, who suggested that if photons lost energy over time through collisions with other particles in a regular way, the more distant objects would appear redder than more nearby ones. Oh, so, what I might have guessed, "it hits stuff sometimes". Article goes on to make it seem like there's a lot working against the notion, including that distant images ought to be a lot fuzzier if light's interacting with other stuff along the way.
  - signalToNose 3y ago
    Light is affected by gravity. But since astrophysics consider the universe to be equal all over it’s often not calculated
    - olddustytrail 3y ago
      Apart from gravitational lensing of course. How does that affect the wavelength?
boeingUH60 3y ago
I can’t even comprehend 26.7 billion years. That’s like the average American living 342 million lives over. The current world superpower is barely 300 years. Imagine what could change in a thousand, then a million, then billion…mind-boggling!
- tristanc 3y ago
  Woah, is this suggesting that the cumulative human-years experienced by current living US population will add up to the age of the entire universe? Mind-boggled again!
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - eindiran 3y ago
    >>> 27600000000 / 332000000 83.13253012048193 According to google the current life expectancy (in 2020) is: 77.28 years So a touch shy, but almost.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
  - esun 3y ago
    and this <waves hands around> is all we have to show for it?
- 7373737373 3y ago
  There are these two nice videos with the (apparently now outdated?) 13 billion years: To Scale: TIME: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nOVvEbH2GC0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nOVvEbH2GC0 Timelapse of the entire Universe: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TBikbn5XJhg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TBikbn5XJhg
- Koshkin 3y ago
  A few minutes in, this video talks about billions of trillions of trillions years into the future. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uD4izuDMUQA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uD4izuDMUQA
RcouF1uZ4gsC 3y ago
I would almost be willing to bet that in 5 years, the consensus will be much closer to the tradition 13.7 billion years, rather than than 26.7 Billion years. I am not a physicist, but my understanding was that multiple different ways of calculating age converge toward the traditional number. For his new estimate seems to be using theories that are still at the fringes of mainstream physics. Based on this, my bet would be on the traditional number.
- incogitor 3y ago
  The convergence is only valid if the distance ladder is accurate. There are a variety of deductive bottlenecks in the distance ladder which could implicate the whole current distance model. Standard candles and redshift measurements are calibrated together, for example. If either is off then the whole current ladder could be invalid.
  - olddustytrail 3y ago
    If absorption lines could magically match that shift, you mean?
- itairall 3y ago
  [dead]
Nesco 3y ago
Title doesn’t reflect it’s the result of a newly hypothesised model
- dandanua 3y ago
  by a single author
  - shagie 3y ago
    ... based on an... "interesting" model for the red shifting of light. > Zwicky's tired light theory proposes that the redshift of light from distant galaxies is due to the gradual loss of energy by photons over vast cosmic distances. However, it was seen to conflict with observations. Yet Gupta found that "by allowing this theory to coexist with the expanding universe, it becomes possible to reinterpret the redshift as a hybrid phenomenon, rather than purely due to expansion." (context for that theory...) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tired_light https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tired_light > The concept was first proposed in 1929 by Fritz Zwicky, who suggested that if photons lost energy over time through collisions with other particles in a regular way, the more distant objects would appear redder than more nearby ones. ... Despite periodic re-examination of the concept, tired light has not been supported by observational tests and remains a fringe topic in astrophysics. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-standard_cosmology#Tired_light https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-standard_cosmology#Tired_l... > Tired light theories challenge the common interpretation of Hubble's Law as a sign the universe is expanding. It was proposed by Fritz Zwicky in 1929. The basic proposal amounted to light losing energy ("getting tired") due to the distance it traveled rather than any metric expansion or physical recession of sources from observers. A traditional explanation of this effect was to attribute a dynamical friction to photons; the photons' gravitational interactions with stars and other material will progressively reduce their momentum, thus producing a redshift. Other proposals for explaining how photons could lose energy included the scattering of light by intervening material in a process similar to observed interstellar reddening. However, all these processes would also tend to blur images of distant objects, and no such blurring has been detected. > Traditional tired light has been found incompatible with the observed time dilation that is associated with the cosmological redshift. This idea is mostly remembered as a falsified alternative explanation for Hubble's law in most astronomy or cosmology discussions.
smaddox 3y ago
When the model doesn't fit, add an extra free parameter! Seriously though, I wonder what the ramifications to other parts of astrophysics would be if this is true.
- redroyal 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - Euphorbium 3y ago
    [flagged]
  - psychphysic 3y ago
    Can't tell if you're being tongue in cheek here.
    - kgwxd 3y ago
      History would imply not.
  - 7373737373 3y ago
    Tell that to the dinosaurs
  - dandanua 3y ago
    And what is a productive utility for you, exactly?
  - notaustinpowers 3y ago
    It's okay to admit you don't understand what astrophysicists do.
  - photonerd 3y ago
    Please tell me this is sarcasm
  - areoform 3y ago
labster 3y ago
Spacetime is expanding to meet the needs of expanding spacetime.
singularity2001 3y ago
and the known diameter is 43B lightyears, which is still mindbending
- hasmanean 3y ago
  Isn’t that a dead giveaway? The universe expanded outwards at the speed of light from a central point…the radius is 21.5 billion lightyears and the diameter is 43B.
  - ianburrell 3y ago
    I'm pretty sure the 43B is the radius. The diameter that we can see is 93B ly according to Wikipedia. The universe is expanding which means we can see more than the age of the universe. The light from far away was carried long as the universe expanded which makes it look like traveled faster than light.
- akira2501 3y ago
  Isn't that a radius, or more specifically, the distance from the earth to the edge of the observable universe?
coding123 3y ago
I'm certain there was time and space before that.
- mynameisash 3y ago
  How can you be certain of that?
pfdietz 3y ago
> tired light Not credible. Tired light doesn't preserve the density of photons in blackbody radiation; the CMBR has density precisely that of blackbody radiation.
- gigs 3y ago
  He isn't proposing steady state. He's basically saying that Dirac might have been right in proposing things like the gravitational constant or fine-structure constant are time variant over long enough times. If what we think are constants, aren't, anything is possible.
  - pfdietz 3y ago
    I don't care. If he's tossing in tired light anywhere, the CMBR won't look like it does. Once you lose the match of density to temperature, you don't get it back.
    - gigs 3y ago
      He isn't. That's the pop science article author's attempt to relate to his work, I think. https://arxiv.org/pdf/2201.11667.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/2201.11667.pdf Here's one of Gupta's papers.
      - raattgift 3y ago
        Ok, gigs, I'll bite. I'm afraid I'm already snarky by the start of the abstract. Why are you waving this preprint around, it doesn't say what you say it says (it's mostly just simple algebra and hey did you know we can put coefficients in front of things)? Also I kinda feel bad kicking an adjunct's paper when it's not his fault you've raised his work here. Also, the paper isn't in itself bad. It's a null result, great. Er er, did I say preprint? It's in MPLA (Mod Phys. Lett. A, if you wanna be all ISO 4 formal)! https://www.worldscientific.com/doi/10.1142/S0217732322501553 https://www.worldscientific.com/doi/10.1142/S021773232250155... Ok, not a particularly good physics journal, but at least it's real (I think; people's opinions on world scientific open access fees vary. Todays article processing charges are... USD $2200, but hey, institutional discounts, call for details like when buying from IBM in the 1980s). "We have attempted to permit concurrent variation of c, G, h, and k in our cosmological, astrophysical and astrometric studies: G~c^3~h^3~k^{3/2}." Concurrent. Concurrent. So great, what's the time relationship? "Let's assume that the coupling constants evolve with the expansion ... as follows: Speed of light: c = c_af_c(a)" Each constant gets the today CODATA value multiplied by some unknown function of a (the scale factor) on that value. Ok, cool, so what are the functions? [Spoiler: they could just be everywhen 1. Spoiler: that's what he concludes. Spoiler: you can stop here, really.] Before going into the functions, he first considers supernovae without seeing the functions. "commoving distance". Commoving. Co-mmoving? Com-moving? Ok, this is a draft. I will make a typo or two in this commment just out of solidarity. Draft? Oh, it's in MPLA! With the typo. https://www.worldscientific.com/doi/pdf/10.1142/S0217732322501553?download=true https://www.worldscientific.com/doi/pdf/10.1142/S02177323225... (just below eqn (1) on the fourth page). <sarcasm> Good catch, editors and reviewer two! </sarcasm> I DO NOT FEEL BAD ABOUT KICKING THEM. Booooooo! Partial refund to the author and/or his institution. Eqn 2-4, Some of the functions on the constants are determined by an unknown function on c. Eqn 5 repeats the relation I quote at the top. "As pointed out by John Hunter (personal communication) the above can be represetned in terms of the variation of the length dimension of each constant ... if a quantity Q has a length dimension of n, it's f_Q(a) = f(a)^n". [bookmark1] Ok, so generalize and put some meat on the "concurrently". I don't have any idea who John Hunter is. Is it https://www.thespaceshow.com/guest/dr.-john-hunter https://www.thespaceshow.com/guest/dr.-john-hunter ? Hey, fascinating, reviewer two has caused the entire paragraph in the preprint (at link you supplied) to not be in the published version (p. 5 just before the start of section 3). John Hunter is also not in the published Acknowledgments section. John Hunter you have been Yezhoved! <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikolai_Yezhov#Legacy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikolai_Yezhov#Legacy> (photo at right). Some words about measurement of mass, and aha, "the Kibble balance test mas m is proportional to h/c^2. Then using equation (5) m \propto f(a)^0 resulting in \dot{m} / m = 0." 4. Discussion "if we do not permit one of the coupling constants to vary, the others are naturally constrained not to vary" more on that in that paragraph. This result, which I do not think section 2 proves, is actually pretty important. If it were proved, and also the assertion at [bookmark1] were proved, it would kill off adaptations of current theories which put a function on any constant with a length dimension, which is commonly done [bookmark2 below]. "The approach we have taken is rather phenomenological". Well, yes. Ra-ther. "A more appropriate and satisfying research would involve writing an action for the interrelated constants represented as fields and derive the relationshop between <constants> with the scale factor a". Right, which is how everyone actually does it. For example DSR <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doubly_special_relativity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doubly_special_relativity>, SME <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard-Model_Extension https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard-Model_Extension>. Nice to know that Dannenberg has talked Gupta into looking at approaches like that. Pretty sure such things are taught out of his department; if not, he could just drive a couple hours down Autoroute 50 and choose a language. "... it is not an easy task and we have initiated collaboration for this challenging work." Great. Now, he does mention Dirac but not as often as you do in the comments on this article; Dirac proposed varying G for reasons. Gupta argues you can't vary just G, so he disagrees with Dirac. As to tired light, which was mentioned in this thread, this paper doesn't say much about it. Back to §4's idea about actually writing down an action and deriving the relationship between the constants and the scale factor. In this paper, the relationship is not put forth. At best the author admits the studies of the international prototype kilogram aren't good evidence (and went the wrong direction, "We expected this tiny mass loss could possibly be accounted for using the interrelatinoship among the constants. We have shown this is not possible ..." and his tiny amount of supernova data can be explained by "alternative models". Nice. The standard model is alternative.
kleene_op 3y ago
IANAP, but as a mathematician it seems extremely inelegant that there would be a start to the time dimension of the space-time object we live in, when we don't even know if the spatial dimensions are finite themselves. It is my understanding that the density of the universe billions of years ago was radically different from the one we now observe, and since density is intrinsically tied to our perception of space and time, wouldn't it make more sense that time actually stretches infinitely the further back we go, thus nullifying the concept of a beginning? I guess I'm having a hard time with the idea that space-time could be discontinuous.
- justrealist 3y ago
  s/"universe"/"Observable universe"/ that's the context in which physicists are talking
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
- kevinventullo 3y ago
  As a fellow mathematician, I think maybe the right way to think about physics is that the claims are never even supposed to be “true” in some absolute mathematical sense. It’s more like true to some first approximation. So maybe we can interpret this claim as saying that 25 billion years ago, the universe was kinda similar to what we have now, but 27 billion years ago everything was ultra compressed and gravity didn’t have a significant effect on anything. Or maybe time is like a left-open interval. Finite, but didn’t have a start. I dunno, I’m making stuff up.
  - Certhas 3y ago
    Left open interval is the right way to view it. There is no contradiction or paradox here. Merely unfamiliarity. But maybe you should not expect the rules of the early universe to be very familiar...
  - User23 3y ago
    Physics is only true modulo theory. It’s intense intellectual arrogance to say “because this model predicts some phenomena the world must conform to this model.” Newton, who I think it’s fair to say was not known for his humility, refused to feign hypotheses and satisfied himself with describing his observations. However in today’s day and age that way lie no fat grants, adulating television specials, or NYT bestsellers.
Certhas 3y ago
From the articles' description, it sounds like a hodgepodge of discredited ideas. Maybe unsurprisingly: If you add _all_ of them, you get enough wiggle room to evade observational constraints...
josh_today 3y ago
[dead]
javajosh 3y ago
Read phys.org with a grain of salt. Or better, don't read it.
- vitehozonage 3y ago
  Yes it seems like 100% of the articles are misleading clickbait. I don't think it's a suitable source for HN ever
  - dandanua 3y ago
    But the title here is even more sensationalized clickbait than the one at the phys.org. And such clickbait edits are not uncommon for HN.
ineedasername 3y ago
The tone of the headline makes it sound like 26.7B is now accepted, but the article indicates it’s mostly just a theory that has a little additional evidence. Is the later a correct reading of the situation?
- U2EF1 3y ago
  It's all just theories. But yes the article is basically summarizing a new paper/model. Most likely: the model is incorrect in some ways. But maybe useful in others.
  - mistermann 3y ago
    Try to convince a member of science's fan base (which includes many actual scientists) of this during an object level discussion about a particular point of contention and see how well it goes over.
  - xwowsersx 3y ago
    Do you mean hypothesis? A theory is a well-substantiated explanation based on evidence...and has undergone some kind of rigorous testing/verification. A hypothesis, on the other hand, is "just" a proposed explanation/prediction based on little (or no?) evidence...which is then tested through experiments, etc.
    - Vecr 3y ago
      Theories about the universe as a whole (or anything outside the solar system at this point) can't really be tested in the normal sense. You can make a theory and then try to look for more data/make observations about the universe and see if they match, but there's no control and you might never get the data you need to say one theory is better than another. You can get lucky of course, but it's not like you can recruit 40_000 universes for a double blinded placebo controlled clinical trial.
      - literalAardvark 3y ago
intrasight 3y ago
It's always seemed wrong to me that the age of the Milky Way and the age of the universe where about the same. Older universe seems intuitively correct.
wodenokoto 3y ago
I remember in middle school I had a very passionate physics teacher who held extra astronomy classes for kids who wanted to join. Particularly I remember when he presented the age of the universe. The age was estimated with something like plus minus 10 billion years. The teacher made a big deal about how incredible this was. When I first heard that number it sounded beyond imprecise. But he explained: Now we actual had a ballpark figure. Before we didn’t know if it was thousands or quintillions of years, so plus minus 10 billions was really good and ground breaking. With that in mind, this kinda seems like a minor adjustment.
- asadotzler 3y ago
  I was in middle school in the mid-80s when I learned the Universe was something like 10-20 billion years old based on our estimates of the Hubble constant from the decade before. I was in high school in the late 80s and early 90s when we used the CBR measures to estimate 14 billion. I was in college when that was refined to 13.7 based on supernova data. That's been tweaked a bit here and there but mostly remained stable.
- javajosh 3y ago
  A healthy perspective - physicists do love their OOM estimates. The universe remains about 10e10 years old, even if this theory is true :)
enduser 3y ago
No wonder I feel tired
- readthenotes1 3y ago
  Huh. I would guess someone named End User would have come from the termination not the origin!
idlewords 3y ago
"if a whole bunch of fundamental physical constants change over time in a specific, coordinated way"
zehaeva 3y ago
That is an awful lot of "mights" and "maybes" stacked on top of an extension hypothesis of an hypothesis
largbae 3y ago
Wouldn't this have profound implications for Drake's Equation? If the universe is that much older, then heavy elements have likely been around much longer. If that's true, then the Solar system is much younger than it was yesterday, relatively speaking...
- jfengel 3y ago
  Not really. Many of the Drake equation numbers have enormous error bars. Which means that the result goes from "We don't really have any idea" to "We don't really have any idea, times two". I suppose you could think of that as a big update to your prior, but it's no change at all to your confidence, which still runs from (0, 1).
  - consumer451 3y ago
    Obligatory relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/384/ https://xkcd.com/384/
- Pxtl 3y ago
  At this point it's reasonable to assume the great filter is ahead of us. Even in the "13-billion-year-old universe" scenario, even a 1% head-start gives another alien species time to colonize every habitable planet in the galaxy thanks to the miracle of geometric growth... if interstellar colonization is at all possible. Which it almost certainly isn't.
  - m3kw9 3y ago
    I think the ideas about needing our seeds spreading across the universe made us very narrow minded. My theory is that the desire to do that is eliminated with advanced enough tech. Say they can create their own universe, dimensions/ virtual worlds/ transfer consciousness/ live forever/etc witch would go against us expecting alien species populating every corner
  - cogman10 3y ago
    That assumes that they want to colonize and that our definition of "habitable" matches is close to their own. Perhaps the most common form of intelligent life likes to live without oxygen. Requires very light gravity. Or has a temperature range widely different from our own. I'd assume that if they wanted to spread out, they'd probably have the ability (like we do) to scout out a solar system before sending a ship. Maybe our 8 planets don't have anything of value for the species looking.
Takennickname 3y ago
Wow. Science sucks.
Pxtl 3y ago
This reads like wishful thinking -- "The universe can't be expanding that rapidly, then galaxies outside of the Local Group will leave the cosmological horizon in 100 billion years! Surely redshift must be a lie!"
jmyeet 3y ago
IANAP but I'm skeptical at any theory that revises the age of the Universe by a factor of 2. It could be the case but the bar is pretty high for such a massive revision. One thing about a lot of this from the Big Bang to black holes is that a lot of it makes sense as mathematical concepts but doesn't necessarily translate to something intuitive. Example: the Big Bang is often described as the Universe starting from a single point. That's an attempt an intuitive explanation but here's another based on the maths. In maths you have the concept of a space that has certain properties. A metric space is a type of space that has, well, a metric. What is a metric? It's a function that defines the distance between two points. So at the start of the Universe, it's more accurate to say the metric between all points was 0. Does that mean it started from a single point? No one really knows. But the metaphor arguably confuses the issue. One issue is the question of whether or not the Universe is infinite. This is an open question in cosomology. Many suspect it is based on spacetime being incredibly flat based on all our observations. But if you assume the Universe is infinite, how do you reconcile that with the Universe starting from a single point? How does something intuititvely finite become infinite? It sort of breaks down. Simply saying the metric was 0 is less problematic (but also less satisfying, in a way). There's an awful lot of evidence for the current age estimate. Expanding that by another 13B years should yield a bunch more stellar objects in the expanded age range. There is AFAIK only one such object we've detected, which the article mentions, the so-called Methusalah star [1], which was originally dated at ~16B years [2]. What's more likely: one object is incorrectly dated or the Universe is twice as old as all observations to this point have suggested? I know where my money is. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HD_140283 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HD_140283 [2]: https://www.space.com/how-can-a-star-be-older-than-the-universe.html https://www.space.com/how-can-a-star-be-older-than-the-unive...
acumenical 3y ago
From what I know about academia and the people who occupy positions within it, who function solely to gatekeep progress and then ship the bare minimum to keep their privileged positions, I look at articles like this one and roll my eyes.
- jjoonathan 3y ago
  Gatekeep progress? Dude, it's cosmology research. What kind of progress are they keeping from whom? As for shipping the bare minimum, academia has too many smart people competing with each other over too little money. I'd hazard a guess that the "bare minimum" as represented by this paper is considerably higher per dollar than the bar set by someone who uses the word "shipping" to describe publishing.
surfsvammel 3y ago
Ok. I’m a novice in this. But isn’t time relative, and also affected by gravity and velocities? When we talk about the age of the universe, from which perspective are we considering it?
- flumpcakes 3y ago
  From my poor understanding of a Physics degree: the "age" is just counted from when everything existed in the same space, before it's rapid expansion. Although, can you say it expanded? It didn't expand into anything because space does not exist outside of the universe. Or do we say it 'expanded' because the distance between the constituent parts inside of the universe grew? It's not good to think about really.
  - lgas 3y ago
    It's the second one. The individual parts moved away from each other. And there's nothing "not good" about thinking about it.
- superposeur 3y ago
  Indeed time is relative. But, the observed distribution of matter in the universe turns out to single out one particular frame of reference (= large scale spacetime coordinate system). Namely the one in which the CMB radiation is isotropic (same in all directions, neither red shifted nor blue shifted). It is with respect to this particular reference frame that the “age of the universe” is defined.
mentos 3y ago
Anyone feel like beginning and ends are just an illusion of the third dimension and at some higher dimension things just ‘exist’?
local_crmdgeon 3y ago
Cosmological constant change proposals are always spicy. I don't know shit about any of this but I learn a ton from these comments.
booleandilemma 3y ago
It doesn't look a day over 10 billion!
nubinetwork 3y ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36696295 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36696295 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36700919 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36700919
causality0 3y ago
Zwicky's tired light theory proposes that the redshift of light from distant galaxies is due to the gradual loss of energy by photons over vast cosmic distances. Wouldn't this being true require upending half of what we know about the nature of photons?
andrewstuart 3y ago
This should not be the headline.
tehologist 3y ago
The universe is aging at an alarming rate.
TexanFeller 3y ago
As a child I was taught the earth could be no older than 6000 years old. These forbidden findings of science are extra exciting to me.
ck2 3y ago
So now the ETs had double the time to invent FTL We really need to figure out faster than light communication soon, any working theories out there?
egberts1 3y ago
I am so old that I remember the Age of Universe as being at 2.1 billion years old. And that I used to visualize the Sun and our solar system doing the multiple corkscrew through space going in from one arm of our spiral galaxy to the next arm of our galaxy.
robbywashere_ 3y ago
*of the known universe
oldandtired 3y ago
I don't know how many of you have looked at age estimates for both the universe and the earth over time. What to me is an interesting observation is that an age is calculated on "best" information at the time. Then comes along an anomalous set of observations that do not conform to the then age calculated. To correct this, a new age is calculated which then pushes back that start time. It seems to me that we have an essential problem here in that whatever metrics we use to calculate the start event time, something will come along which upsets that apple cart. Mayhaps, we need to look at the various methodologies in use and see what alternatives might be a better fit for the data we collect. It seems to me that these age calculations are based on a number of unverifiable presuppositions. It might be better to say that we just do not know as we keep getting anomalies that throw whatever estimates we have into doubt, instead of stating with the current confidence that we do. Just because we do not know now, does not mean that we won't develop the tools at a later date that will clarify the problem. Being honest that we do not know should never be a problem for anyone. It should be an opportunity to rethink the matter and try something else to see if we can solve things another way. Engineering has to deal with this kind of dilemma and though it may take decades or longer to develop the understanding of why something works or does not work, many times understanding does come even while using the techniques in the mean time.
cygx 3y ago
See [1] for a less revolutionary possible solution to the 'Impossibly Early Galaxy Problem', namely, that the initial mass function [2] (distribution of masses of newly-formed stars) was different in the early universe, mainly due to the higher ambient temperature. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W4KH1Jw6HBI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W4KH1Jw6HBI (Dr. Becky) [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Initial_mass_function https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Initial_mass_function
shri_krishna 3y ago
Still short of 310.733 trillion years. But science is getting close!

285 points by hsnewman 3y ago

scld 3y ago

I'm no scientist, but I'm on team "Inflation didn't happen the way we say it did", so a 2x aged universe sounds good to me :)

mydriasis 3y ago

> Zwicky's tired light theory proposes that the redshift of light from distant galaxies is due to the gradual loss of energy by photons over vast cosmic distances. However, it was seen to conflict with observations. Yet Gupta found that "by allowing this theory to coexist with the expanding universe, it becomes possible to reinterpret the redshift as a hybrid phenomenon, rather than purely due to expansion." Aww, the light needs a little nap. No wonder we ( potentially ) got it wrong...!

bamfly 3y ago
Where's the energy going, supposedly? I'd assumed "the light's losing energy" had been firmly ruled out long ago—it was a potential explanation that occurred to me the very first time I heard about the observed red shift of distant galaxies, so I figured it must be very and obviously wrong if I'd never heard an actual physicist even mention the possibility of that as a notable factor. [EDIT] Wikipedia "Tired Light" article: > The concept was first proposed in 1929 by Fritz Zwicky, who suggested that if photons lost energy over time through collisions with other particles in a regular way, the more distant objects would appear redder than more nearby ones. Oh, so, what I might have guessed, "it hits stuff sometimes". Article goes on to make it seem like there's a lot working against the notion, including that distant images ought to be a lot fuzzier if light's interacting with other stuff along the way.
- signalToNose 3y ago
  Light is affected by gravity. But since astrophysics consider the universe to be equal all over it’s often not calculated
  - olddustytrail 3y ago
    Apart from gravitational lensing of course. How does that affect the wavelength?

boeingUH60 3y ago

I can’t even comprehend 26.7 billion years. That’s like the average American living 342 million lives over. The current world superpower is barely 300 years. Imagine what could change in a thousand, then a million, then billion…mind-boggling!

tristanc 3y ago
Woah, is this suggesting that the cumulative human-years experienced by current living US population will add up to the age of the entire universe? Mind-boggled again!
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- eindiran 3y ago
  >>> 27600000000 / 332000000 83.13253012048193 According to google the current life expectancy (in 2020) is: 77.28 years So a touch shy, but almost.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
- esun 3y ago
  and this <waves hands around> is all we have to show for it?
7373737373 3y ago
There are these two nice videos with the (apparently now outdated?) 13 billion years: To Scale: TIME: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nOVvEbH2GC0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nOVvEbH2GC0 Timelapse of the entire Universe: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TBikbn5XJhg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TBikbn5XJhg
Koshkin 3y ago
A few minutes in, this video talks about billions of trillions of trillions years into the future. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uD4izuDMUQA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uD4izuDMUQA

RcouF1uZ4gsC 3y ago

I would almost be willing to bet that in 5 years, the consensus will be much closer to the tradition 13.7 billion years, rather than than 26.7 Billion years. I am not a physicist, but my understanding was that multiple different ways of calculating age converge toward the traditional number. For his new estimate seems to be using theories that are still at the fringes of mainstream physics. Based on this, my bet would be on the traditional number.

incogitor 3y ago
The convergence is only valid if the distance ladder is accurate. There are a variety of deductive bottlenecks in the distance ladder which could implicate the whole current distance model. Standard candles and redshift measurements are calibrated together, for example. If either is off then the whole current ladder could be invalid.
- olddustytrail 3y ago
  If absorption lines could magically match that shift, you mean?
itairall 3y ago
[dead]

Nesco 3y ago

Title doesn’t reflect it’s the result of a newly hypothesised model

dandanua 3y ago
by a single author
- shagie 3y ago
  ... based on an... "interesting" model for the red shifting of light. > Zwicky's tired light theory proposes that the redshift of light from distant galaxies is due to the gradual loss of energy by photons over vast cosmic distances. However, it was seen to conflict with observations. Yet Gupta found that "by allowing this theory to coexist with the expanding universe, it becomes possible to reinterpret the redshift as a hybrid phenomenon, rather than purely due to expansion." (context for that theory...) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tired_light https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tired_light > The concept was first proposed in 1929 by Fritz Zwicky, who suggested that if photons lost energy over time through collisions with other particles in a regular way, the more distant objects would appear redder than more nearby ones. ... Despite periodic re-examination of the concept, tired light has not been supported by observational tests and remains a fringe topic in astrophysics. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-standard_cosmology#Tired_light https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-standard_cosmology#Tired_l... > Tired light theories challenge the common interpretation of Hubble's Law as a sign the universe is expanding. It was proposed by Fritz Zwicky in 1929. The basic proposal amounted to light losing energy ("getting tired") due to the distance it traveled rather than any metric expansion or physical recession of sources from observers. A traditional explanation of this effect was to attribute a dynamical friction to photons; the photons' gravitational interactions with stars and other material will progressively reduce their momentum, thus producing a redshift. Other proposals for explaining how photons could lose energy included the scattering of light by intervening material in a process similar to observed interstellar reddening. However, all these processes would also tend to blur images of distant objects, and no such blurring has been detected. > Traditional tired light has been found incompatible with the observed time dilation that is associated with the cosmological redshift. This idea is mostly remembered as a falsified alternative explanation for Hubble's law in most astronomy or cosmology discussions.

smaddox 3y ago

When the model doesn't fit, add an extra free parameter! Seriously though, I wonder what the ramifications to other parts of astrophysics would be if this is true.

redroyal 3y ago
[flagged]
- Euphorbium 3y ago
  [flagged]
- psychphysic 3y ago
  Can't tell if you're being tongue in cheek here.
  - kgwxd 3y ago
    History would imply not.
- 7373737373 3y ago
  Tell that to the dinosaurs
- dandanua 3y ago
  And what is a productive utility for you, exactly?
- notaustinpowers 3y ago
  It's okay to admit you don't understand what astrophysicists do.
- photonerd 3y ago
  Please tell me this is sarcasm
- areoform 3y ago

labster 3y ago

Spacetime is expanding to meet the needs of expanding spacetime.

singularity2001 3y ago

and the known diameter is 43B lightyears, which is still mindbending

hasmanean 3y ago
Isn’t that a dead giveaway? The universe expanded outwards at the speed of light from a central point…the radius is 21.5 billion lightyears and the diameter is 43B.
- ianburrell 3y ago
  I'm pretty sure the 43B is the radius. The diameter that we can see is 93B ly according to Wikipedia. The universe is expanding which means we can see more than the age of the universe. The light from far away was carried long as the universe expanded which makes it look like traveled faster than light.
akira2501 3y ago
Isn't that a radius, or more specifically, the distance from the earth to the edge of the observable universe?

coding123 3y ago

I'm certain there was time and space before that.

mynameisash 3y ago
How can you be certain of that?

pfdietz 3y ago

> tired light Not credible. Tired light doesn't preserve the density of photons in blackbody radiation; the CMBR has density precisely that of blackbody radiation.

gigs 3y ago
He isn't proposing steady state. He's basically saying that Dirac might have been right in proposing things like the gravitational constant or fine-structure constant are time variant over long enough times. If what we think are constants, aren't, anything is possible.
- pfdietz 3y ago
  I don't care. If he's tossing in tired light anywhere, the CMBR won't look like it does. Once you lose the match of density to temperature, you don't get it back.
  - gigs 3y ago
    He isn't. That's the pop science article author's attempt to relate to his work, I think. https://arxiv.org/pdf/2201.11667.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/2201.11667.pdf Here's one of Gupta's papers.
    - raattgift 3y ago
      Ok, gigs, I'll bite. I'm afraid I'm already snarky by the start of the abstract. Why are you waving this preprint around, it doesn't say what you say it says (it's mostly just simple algebra and hey did you know we can put coefficients in front of things)? Also I kinda feel bad kicking an adjunct's paper when it's not his fault you've raised his work here. Also, the paper isn't in itself bad. It's a null result, great. Er er, did I say preprint? It's in MPLA (Mod Phys. Lett. A, if you wanna be all ISO 4 formal)! https://www.worldscientific.com/doi/10.1142/S0217732322501553 https://www.worldscientific.com/doi/10.1142/S021773232250155... Ok, not a particularly good physics journal, but at least it's real (I think; people's opinions on world scientific open access fees vary. Todays article processing charges are... USD $2200, but hey, institutional discounts, call for details like when buying from IBM in the 1980s). "We have attempted to permit concurrent variation of c, G, h, and k in our cosmological, astrophysical and astrometric studies: G~c^3~h^3~k^{3/2}." Concurrent. Concurrent. So great, what's the time relationship? "Let's assume that the coupling constants evolve with the expansion ... as follows: Speed of light: c = c_af_c(a)" Each constant gets the today CODATA value multiplied by some unknown function of a (the scale factor) on that value. Ok, cool, so what are the functions? [Spoiler: they could just be everywhen 1. Spoiler: that's what he concludes. Spoiler: you can stop here, really.] Before going into the functions, he first considers supernovae without seeing the functions. "commoving distance". Commoving. Co-mmoving? Com-moving? Ok, this is a draft. I will make a typo or two in this commment just out of solidarity. Draft? Oh, it's in MPLA! With the typo. https://www.worldscientific.com/doi/pdf/10.1142/S0217732322501553?download=true https://www.worldscientific.com/doi/pdf/10.1142/S02177323225... (just below eqn (1) on the fourth page). <sarcasm> Good catch, editors and reviewer two! </sarcasm> I DO NOT FEEL BAD ABOUT KICKING THEM. Booooooo! Partial refund to the author and/or his institution. Eqn 2-4, Some of the functions on the constants are determined by an unknown function on c. Eqn 5 repeats the relation I quote at the top. "As pointed out by John Hunter (personal communication) the above can be represetned in terms of the variation of the length dimension of each constant ... if a quantity Q has a length dimension of n, it's f_Q(a) = f(a)^n". [bookmark1] Ok, so generalize and put some meat on the "concurrently". I don't have any idea who John Hunter is. Is it https://www.thespaceshow.com/guest/dr.-john-hunter https://www.thespaceshow.com/guest/dr.-john-hunter ? Hey, fascinating, reviewer two has caused the entire paragraph in the preprint (at link you supplied) to not be in the published version (p. 5 just before the start of section 3). John Hunter is also not in the published Acknowledgments section. John Hunter you have been Yezhoved! <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikolai_Yezhov#Legacy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikolai_Yezhov#Legacy> (photo at right). Some words about measurement of mass, and aha, "the Kibble balance test mas m is proportional to h/c^2. Then using equation (5) m \propto f(a)^0 resulting in \dot{m} / m = 0." 4. Discussion "if we do not permit one of the coupling constants to vary, the others are naturally constrained not to vary" more on that in that paragraph. This result, which I do not think section 2 proves, is actually pretty important. If it were proved, and also the assertion at [bookmark1] were proved, it would kill off adaptations of current theories which put a function on any constant with a length dimension, which is commonly done [bookmark2 below]. "The approach we have taken is rather phenomenological". Well, yes. Ra-ther. "A more appropriate and satisfying research would involve writing an action for the interrelated constants represented as fields and derive the relationshop between <constants> with the scale factor a". Right, which is how everyone actually does it. For example DSR <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doubly_special_relativity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doubly_special_relativity>, SME <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard-Model_Extension https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard-Model_Extension>. Nice to know that Dannenberg has talked Gupta into looking at approaches like that. Pretty sure such things are taught out of his department; if not, he could just drive a couple hours down Autoroute 50 and choose a language. "... it is not an easy task and we have initiated collaboration for this challenging work." Great. Now, he does mention Dirac but not as often as you do in the comments on this article; Dirac proposed varying G for reasons. Gupta argues you can't vary just G, so he disagrees with Dirac. As to tired light, which was mentioned in this thread, this paper doesn't say much about it. Back to §4's idea about actually writing down an action and deriving the relationship between the constants and the scale factor. In this paper, the relationship is not put forth. At best the author admits the studies of the international prototype kilogram aren't good evidence (and went the wrong direction, "We expected this tiny mass loss could possibly be accounted for using the interrelatinoship among the constants. We have shown this is not possible ..." and his tiny amount of supernova data can be explained by "alternative models". Nice. The standard model is alternative.

kleene_op 3y ago

IANAP, but as a mathematician it seems extremely inelegant that there would be a start to the time dimension of the space-time object we live in, when we don't even know if the spatial dimensions are finite themselves. It is my understanding that the density of the universe billions of years ago was radically different from the one we now observe, and since density is intrinsically tied to our perception of space and time, wouldn't it make more sense that time actually stretches infinitely the further back we go, thus nullifying the concept of a beginning? I guess I'm having a hard time with the idea that space-time could be discontinuous.

justrealist 3y ago
s/"universe"/"Observable universe"/ that's the context in which physicists are talking
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
kevinventullo 3y ago
As a fellow mathematician, I think maybe the right way to think about physics is that the claims are never even supposed to be “true” in some absolute mathematical sense. It’s more like true to some first approximation. So maybe we can interpret this claim as saying that 25 billion years ago, the universe was kinda similar to what we have now, but 27 billion years ago everything was ultra compressed and gravity didn’t have a significant effect on anything. Or maybe time is like a left-open interval. Finite, but didn’t have a start. I dunno, I’m making stuff up.
- Certhas 3y ago
  Left open interval is the right way to view it. There is no contradiction or paradox here. Merely unfamiliarity. But maybe you should not expect the rules of the early universe to be very familiar...
- User23 3y ago
  Physics is only true modulo theory. It’s intense intellectual arrogance to say “because this model predicts some phenomena the world must conform to this model.” Newton, who I think it’s fair to say was not known for his humility, refused to feign hypotheses and satisfied himself with describing his observations. However in today’s day and age that way lie no fat grants, adulating television specials, or NYT bestsellers.

Certhas 3y ago

From the articles' description, it sounds like a hodgepodge of discredited ideas. Maybe unsurprisingly: If you add _all_ of them, you get enough wiggle room to evade observational constraints...

josh_today 3y ago

[dead]

javajosh 3y ago

Read phys.org with a grain of salt. Or better, don't read it.

vitehozonage 3y ago
Yes it seems like 100% of the articles are misleading clickbait. I don't think it's a suitable source for HN ever
- dandanua 3y ago
  But the title here is even more sensationalized clickbait than the one at the phys.org. And such clickbait edits are not uncommon for HN.

ineedasername 3y ago

The tone of the headline makes it sound like 26.7B is now accepted, but the article indicates it’s mostly just a theory that has a little additional evidence. Is the later a correct reading of the situation?

U2EF1 3y ago
It's all just theories. But yes the article is basically summarizing a new paper/model. Most likely: the model is incorrect in some ways. But maybe useful in others.
- mistermann 3y ago
  Try to convince a member of science's fan base (which includes many actual scientists) of this during an object level discussion about a particular point of contention and see how well it goes over.
- xwowsersx 3y ago
  Do you mean hypothesis? A theory is a well-substantiated explanation based on evidence...and has undergone some kind of rigorous testing/verification. A hypothesis, on the other hand, is "just" a proposed explanation/prediction based on little (or no?) evidence...which is then tested through experiments, etc.
  - Vecr 3y ago
    Theories about the universe as a whole (or anything outside the solar system at this point) can't really be tested in the normal sense. You can make a theory and then try to look for more data/make observations about the universe and see if they match, but there's no control and you might never get the data you need to say one theory is better than another. You can get lucky of course, but it's not like you can recruit 40_000 universes for a double blinded placebo controlled clinical trial.
    - literalAardvark 3y ago

intrasight 3y ago

It's always seemed wrong to me that the age of the Milky Way and the age of the universe where about the same. Older universe seems intuitively correct.

wodenokoto 3y ago

I remember in middle school I had a very passionate physics teacher who held extra astronomy classes for kids who wanted to join. Particularly I remember when he presented the age of the universe. The age was estimated with something like plus minus 10 billion years. The teacher made a big deal about how incredible this was. When I first heard that number it sounded beyond imprecise. But he explained: Now we actual had a ballpark figure. Before we didn’t know if it was thousands or quintillions of years, so plus minus 10 billions was really good and ground breaking. With that in mind, this kinda seems like a minor adjustment.

asadotzler 3y ago
I was in middle school in the mid-80s when I learned the Universe was something like 10-20 billion years old based on our estimates of the Hubble constant from the decade before. I was in high school in the late 80s and early 90s when we used the CBR measures to estimate 14 billion. I was in college when that was refined to 13.7 based on supernova data. That's been tweaked a bit here and there but mostly remained stable.
javajosh 3y ago
A healthy perspective - physicists do love their OOM estimates. The universe remains about 10e10 years old, even if this theory is true :)

enduser 3y ago

No wonder I feel tired

readthenotes1 3y ago
Huh. I would guess someone named End User would have come from the termination not the origin!

idlewords 3y ago

"if a whole bunch of fundamental physical constants change over time in a specific, coordinated way"

zehaeva 3y ago

That is an awful lot of "mights" and "maybes" stacked on top of an extension hypothesis of an hypothesis

largbae 3y ago

Wouldn't this have profound implications for Drake's Equation? If the universe is that much older, then heavy elements have likely been around much longer. If that's true, then the Solar system is much younger than it was yesterday, relatively speaking...

jfengel 3y ago
Not really. Many of the Drake equation numbers have enormous error bars. Which means that the result goes from "We don't really have any idea" to "We don't really have any idea, times two". I suppose you could think of that as a big update to your prior, but it's no change at all to your confidence, which still runs from (0, 1).
- consumer451 3y ago
  Obligatory relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/384/ https://xkcd.com/384/
Pxtl 3y ago
At this point it's reasonable to assume the great filter is ahead of us. Even in the "13-billion-year-old universe" scenario, even a 1% head-start gives another alien species time to colonize every habitable planet in the galaxy thanks to the miracle of geometric growth... if interstellar colonization is at all possible. Which it almost certainly isn't.
- m3kw9 3y ago
  I think the ideas about needing our seeds spreading across the universe made us very narrow minded. My theory is that the desire to do that is eliminated with advanced enough tech. Say they can create their own universe, dimensions/ virtual worlds/ transfer consciousness/ live forever/etc witch would go against us expecting alien species populating every corner
- cogman10 3y ago
  That assumes that they want to colonize and that our definition of "habitable" matches is close to their own. Perhaps the most common form of intelligent life likes to live without oxygen. Requires very light gravity. Or has a temperature range widely different from our own. I'd assume that if they wanted to spread out, they'd probably have the ability (like we do) to scout out a solar system before sending a ship. Maybe our 8 planets don't have anything of value for the species looking.

Takennickname 3y ago

Wow. Science sucks.

Pxtl 3y ago

This reads like wishful thinking -- "The universe can't be expanding that rapidly, then galaxies outside of the Local Group will leave the cosmological horizon in 100 billion years! Surely redshift must be a lie!"

jmyeet 3y ago

IANAP but I'm skeptical at any theory that revises the age of the Universe by a factor of 2. It could be the case but the bar is pretty high for such a massive revision. One thing about a lot of this from the Big Bang to black holes is that a lot of it makes sense as mathematical concepts but doesn't necessarily translate to something intuitive. Example: the Big Bang is often described as the Universe starting from a single point. That's an attempt an intuitive explanation but here's another based on the maths. In maths you have the concept of a space that has certain properties. A metric space is a type of space that has, well, a metric. What is a metric? It's a function that defines the distance between two points. So at the start of the Universe, it's more accurate to say the metric between all points was 0. Does that mean it started from a single point? No one really knows. But the metaphor arguably confuses the issue. One issue is the question of whether or not the Universe is infinite. This is an open question in cosomology. Many suspect it is based on spacetime being incredibly flat based on all our observations. But if you assume the Universe is infinite, how do you reconcile that with the Universe starting from a single point? How does something intuititvely finite become infinite? It sort of breaks down. Simply saying the metric was 0 is less problematic (but also less satisfying, in a way). There's an awful lot of evidence for the current age estimate. Expanding that by another 13B years should yield a bunch more stellar objects in the expanded age range. There is AFAIK only one such object we've detected, which the article mentions, the so-called Methusalah star [1], which was originally dated at ~16B years [2]. What's more likely: one object is incorrectly dated or the Universe is twice as old as all observations to this point have suggested? I know where my money is. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HD_140283 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HD_140283 [2]: https://www.space.com/how-can-a-star-be-older-than-the-universe.html https://www.space.com/how-can-a-star-be-older-than-the-unive...

acumenical 3y ago

From what I know about academia and the people who occupy positions within it, who function solely to gatekeep progress and then ship the bare minimum to keep their privileged positions, I look at articles like this one and roll my eyes.

jjoonathan 3y ago
Gatekeep progress? Dude, it's cosmology research. What kind of progress are they keeping from whom? As for shipping the bare minimum, academia has too many smart people competing with each other over too little money. I'd hazard a guess that the "bare minimum" as represented by this paper is considerably higher per dollar than the bar set by someone who uses the word "shipping" to describe publishing.

surfsvammel 3y ago

Ok. I’m a novice in this. But isn’t time relative, and also affected by gravity and velocities? When we talk about the age of the universe, from which perspective are we considering it?

flumpcakes 3y ago
From my poor understanding of a Physics degree: the "age" is just counted from when everything existed in the same space, before it's rapid expansion. Although, can you say it expanded? It didn't expand into anything because space does not exist outside of the universe. Or do we say it 'expanded' because the distance between the constituent parts inside of the universe grew? It's not good to think about really.
- lgas 3y ago
  It's the second one. The individual parts moved away from each other. And there's nothing "not good" about thinking about it.
superposeur 3y ago
Indeed time is relative. But, the observed distribution of matter in the universe turns out to single out one particular frame of reference (= large scale spacetime coordinate system). Namely the one in which the CMB radiation is isotropic (same in all directions, neither red shifted nor blue shifted). It is with respect to this particular reference frame that the “age of the universe” is defined.

mentos 3y ago

Anyone feel like beginning and ends are just an illusion of the third dimension and at some higher dimension things just ‘exist’?

local_crmdgeon 3y ago

Cosmological constant change proposals are always spicy. I don't know shit about any of this but I learn a ton from these comments.

booleandilemma 3y ago

It doesn't look a day over 10 billion!

nubinetwork 3y ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36696295 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36696295 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36700919 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36700919

causality0 3y ago

Zwicky's tired light theory proposes that the redshift of light from distant galaxies is due to the gradual loss of energy by photons over vast cosmic distances. Wouldn't this being true require upending half of what we know about the nature of photons?

andrewstuart 3y ago

This should not be the headline.

tehologist 3y ago

The universe is aging at an alarming rate.

TexanFeller 3y ago

As a child I was taught the earth could be no older than 6000 years old. These forbidden findings of science are extra exciting to me.

ck2 3y ago

So now the ETs had double the time to invent FTL We really need to figure out faster than light communication soon, any working theories out there?

egberts1 3y ago

I am so old that I remember the Age of Universe as being at 2.1 billion years old. And that I used to visualize the Sun and our solar system doing the multiple corkscrew through space going in from one arm of our spiral galaxy to the next arm of our galaxy.

robbywashere_ 3y ago

*of the known universe

oldandtired 3y ago

I don't know how many of you have looked at age estimates for both the universe and the earth over time. What to me is an interesting observation is that an age is calculated on "best" information at the time. Then comes along an anomalous set of observations that do not conform to the then age calculated. To correct this, a new age is calculated which then pushes back that start time. It seems to me that we have an essential problem here in that whatever metrics we use to calculate the start event time, something will come along which upsets that apple cart. Mayhaps, we need to look at the various methodologies in use and see what alternatives might be a better fit for the data we collect. It seems to me that these age calculations are based on a number of unverifiable presuppositions. It might be better to say that we just do not know as we keep getting anomalies that throw whatever estimates we have into doubt, instead of stating with the current confidence that we do. Just because we do not know now, does not mean that we won't develop the tools at a later date that will clarify the problem. Being honest that we do not know should never be a problem for anyone. It should be an opportunity to rethink the matter and try something else to see if we can solve things another way. Engineering has to deal with this kind of dilemma and though it may take decades or longer to develop the understanding of why something works or does not work, many times understanding does come even while using the techniques in the mean time.

cygx 3y ago

See [1] for a less revolutionary possible solution to the 'Impossibly Early Galaxy Problem', namely, that the initial mass function [2] (distribution of masses of newly-formed stars) was different in the early universe, mainly due to the higher ambient temperature. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W4KH1Jw6HBI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W4KH1Jw6HBI (Dr. Becky) [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Initial_mass_function https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Initial_mass_function

shri_krishna 3y ago

Still short of 310.733 trillion years. But science is getting close!