Our universe is a weird and often confusing place. Trying to get a handle on all that is going on takes myriad telescopes that work from on the Earth to in orbit around the Earth to try and build as complete a picture of our changing sky as possible. 

Today’s news has so far covered X-rays with NICER, optical observations with telescopes including the Hubble Space Telescope, and now we travel out to the microwave, where a new paper on arXiv and shared out by the Simons Foundation uses the Atacama Cosmology Telescope to look at the small scale variations in polarization in the cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation to try and measure the age of the universe. They estimate the age at 13.77 billion years, give or take 40 million years, an age consistent with that determined by the Planck telescope, which also studied various characteristics of the CMB. This would correspond to a Hubble Constant of 67.6 km/s per megaparsec of space. 

While this new paper, with lead author Simone Aiola, stresses that these results are accurate, match Planck, and point to an older universe, these results don’t match observations based on observing the expansion that has been taking place for most recent 11 billion years. Those models are coming up with a universe that is substantially younger and expanding faster. 

More Information

Simons Foundation press release 

“The Atacama Cosmology Telescope: DR4 Maps and Cosmological Parameters,” Simone Aiola et al., 2020 (Preprint on arxiv.org)

“The Atacama Cosmology Telescope: A Measurement of the Cosmic Microwave Background Power Spectra at 98 and 150 GHz,” Steve K. Choi et al., 2020 (Preprint on arxiv.org)