The universe is older than previously thought, according to one scientific source. And by older, I mean like, way, way, way, way older than 6000 years.
Check it:
Read the rest at the link!
http://www.badastronomy.com/bablog/2...ion-years-old/
Some food for thought.
Check it:
Quote:
| Happy birthday, Universe! Kinda. It’s not really the Universe’s birthday, but now we do know to high accuracy just how old it is. How? NASA’s WMAP is the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (which is a mouthful, and why we just call it WMAP). It was designed to map the Universe with exquisite precision, detecting microwaves coming from the most distant source there is: the cooling fireball of the Big Bang itself. New results just released from WMAP have nailed down lots of cool stuff — literally — about the Universe. I am about to explain the early Universe to you. I’ll be brief, but if you want to skip to the results, then go ahead. Here’s the quick version: the Big Bang was hot. The Universe itself expanded outward from a single point — actually, it’s space itself that expands, not the objects in it — and like any expanding gas it cooled. After about a microsecond, it had cooled enough for protons and neutrons to form. Three minutes later (yes, just three minutes) it had cooled enough for protons and neutrons to stick together. Hydrogen, helium, and just a dash of lithium were created, and these would be the only elements for some time (hundreds of millions of years, in fact). The Universe was a thick soup of matter and energy. It kept expanding and cooling. At this point, it was opaque to light. A photon couldn’t travel an inch without smacking into an electron and then getting sent off in some other random direction. However, after a few hundred thousand years, an amazing thing happened: neutral hydrogen could form. Before this point, the Universe was still too hot; as soon as an electron bonded with a proton, some ultraviolet photon would come along and whack it off. But at that golden moment the cosmos had cooled off enough that a lasting atomic relationship was in the offing. Neutral hydrogen was born. At that moment — astronomers call it recombination, which is a misnomer, since it was the first time electrons and protons could combine — the Universe became transparent; without all those pesky electrons floating around, photons found themselves free to travel long distances. |
http://www.badastronomy.com/bablog/2...ion-years-old/
Some food for thought.
