WASHINGTON – NASA astronomers have announced they have a new way to measure the age of the universe and concluded that it is between 12 and 13 billion years old.
Scientists working with data from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope based their estimate on what they knew about the lifespan of white dwarf stars to calculate their ages.
White dwarfs were once full-fledged stars like the sun, but have since run out of fuel and all tend to cool at about the same rate. Experts used the Hubble to examine the faintest – and therefore the oldest – stars they could find and then calculated backward to determine their ages.
The white dwarfs they studied were part of a globular cluster of stars known as M-4, about 7,000 light years away. The scientists chose M-4 because it is the cluster nearest and most visible to Earth.
NASA officials say the latest estimate nearly matches an older calculation of 13 to 14 billion years based on the speed at which the universe is expanding. They say reaching a similar conclusion from two different methods means they are close to an exact answer.
