How old is the universe? Astronomers have been homing in on an increasingly precise estimate for its age for decades. Now, a new research paper based on observational data gives of the most precise estimations yet: 13.77 billion years old, give or take some chronological chump change of 40 million years.
The research, which was published in the Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics, analyzed the oldest light sources in the universe based on data from the Chilean National Science Foundation's Atacama Cosmology Telescope (ACT). Researchers looked at data from the same light sources that came from the European Space Agency's space-based Planck satellite, which gathered its own information about remnants from the Big Bang between 2009 and 2013. The authors pledged to publicly release all of the data that they used to form the basis for their conclusions.
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