Of Popular Mechanics
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Dozens of scientists have worked on new research confirming the age of the universe.
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The cosmological community faltered last year with news of a rogue estimate, but new evidence confirms the previous number.
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The researchers used data from the telescope to corroborate information about the cosmic background radiation.
New research confirms the “standard” age of the universe: about 13.8 billion years old. Quite old!
The new revelation follows a 2019 deviation made by researchers who insisted that the actual age is hundreds of millions of years younger. A team of scientists has uploaded a series of documents to arXiv, before any subsequent publication, detailing the findings of the Atacama Cosmology Telescope (ACT) in the Atacama desert in Chile.
“The ACT research team is an international collaboration of scientists from 41 institutions in seven countries,” participant Stony Brook University said in a statement. All scientists collaborate in large groups on papers published using ACT data, including this year alone a handful of articles ranging from environmental microwave studies to high-resolution mapping and light measurements themselves.
In the new article, Stony Brook highlights, led by theoretical and physical cosmologist Neelima Sehgal, scientists use the light race across the universe to turn back the clock, track the age of light, and shape an image of the fledgling universe. As they approach absolute zero, scientists reduce the Big Bang in extremely small increments that get closer and closer to their asymptote-like target.
In this case, using ACT to examine the cosmic microwave background (CMB), an ancient ambient radiation that fills the entire universe, can help scientists fill in that original image. And in this particular analysis, scientists used ACT’s powerful observation to select and assemble a new data set to study CMB.
To do that, they used complex mathematics to filter out an extraordinary amount of cosmic noise. And it was all enabled by the sheer power of ACT in the first place.
Within cosmological research communities, scientists who study CMB especially disagree on the best metric for extracting CMB data. The researchers explain:
“Here and at A20 we present a significant step in addressing stresses with a new, accurate measurement with much of the weight of parameter determination coming from the CMB polarization and its correlation with temperature as opposed to its temperature anisotropy.”
With a larger, more accurate observation tool, they can adjust a finer, more accurate metric that is based less on anisotropy, the way that CMB changes along the observation axes, and more on temperature and polarization.
Polarization, as a phenomenon studied with CMB, dates back to 2002 and does not replace so much, but rather complements the study of anisotropy within the universe. Scientists believe that polarization is a symptom of inflation in the universe that also explains anisotropy.
In that sense, moving from a model that is based on anisotropy measurements to one that also examines polarization means that the entire measurement can be close to the source.
This is a realization of one of ACT’s main goals, in fact. ACT’s position in Chile gives it a clear view of half the sky, and the observatory accumulates data every day. Now, that massive data set can be compared to that of a major CMB mapping satellite, Planck, launched by the European Space Agency in 2009.
“[ACT’s] The main objective is to map the CMB temperature anisotropy and polarization at angular scales and sensitivities that complement those of the WMAP and Planck satellites, ”the researchers explain. And it turns out that they agree, with much more to continue studying.
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