We all have to admit that there’s a lot more to learn about the Big Bang, the moment when the Universe burst into existence. This is a difficult concept for the comprehension of the human mind, as we can’t imagine anything that came out of nothing. Some scientists even claim that there was something existing before the Big Bang, and they keep searching for answers and explanations.
Even though the Big Bang was the beginning of our Universe or not, one thing’s for sure: the event happened about 13.8 billion years ago. One of the proofs is the Atacama Cosmology Telescope detecting the cosmic microwave background, which is the oldest light in the Universe.
Age of the Universe: 13.77 billion years
Chile’s Atacama Desert is the place where astronomers with the Atacama Cosmology Telescope of the National Science Foundation had been observing once again the oldest light in the Universe. They also had been using some cosmic geometry to confirm that the Universe is 13.77 billion years old, and give or take 40 million years. The new estimate matches the previous one pretty well.
But not so fast, as a twist to an ongoing debate now emerges. Research teams that measured the movements of galaxies have concluded that the Universe is hundreds of millions of years younger than what the Planck team predicted. That problem is that a new model for the Universe could be needed, and there’s a concern that some measurements might be incorrect.
This is a portion of a new picture representing the oldest light in the Universe, and it was taken by the Atacama Cosmology Telescope.
The Atacama measurements claim that the Hubble constant is 67.6 kilometers per second per megaparsec, which means how fast is the Universe expanding. This outcome matches pretty well the previous estimate of 67.4 made by the Planck satellite team. However, it’s still slower than the 74 inferred from the measurements of galaxies.
Jeff McMahon, who is an associate professor of astronomy and astrophysics from the University of Chicago, declared:
“Making this independent measurement is really exciting because there’s a mystery in the field, and this helps us sharpen our understanding of that mystery,”
“This confirms the ongoing discrepancy. And we still have much more data to analyze, so this is just the beginning.”
Two new papers about the findings were posted July 15, and you can find them.
