Name: John D Colgren
Status: Other
Age: N/A
Location: N/A
Country: N/A
Date: N/A
Question:
Recent reports on hubble show the universe to be younger than some stars.
How does this change thinking on topics such as Big Bang
Replies:
Well, it makes the Big Bang theory look a little more suspicious. The Big
Bang has been extremely successful in explaining various features of our
universe - the expansion, the background of microwaves permeating space, the
abundance of various elements. So most likely every effort will be made to
figure out how these new measurements might fit into a Big Bang-like theory.
For example, our estimates of the ages of those old stars could be wrong, or
there could still be something funny about the Hubble measurement. At least
the numbers are coming out roughly in agreement - between 8 and 20 billion
years for the age of the universe and the age of those stars around 15
billion years. It would have been really fatal if we thought those stars
were 1 trillion years old, or if the Hubble constant gave an age of only 1
million years for the universe!
NEWTON is an electronic community for Science, Math, and Computer Science K-12 Educators, sponsored and operated by Argonne National Laboratory's Educational Programs, Andrew Skipor, Ph.D., Head of Educational Programs.
