Universe is 13.7 billion years old

[Luke_Wilbur]

The Italian-French mathematician Joseph-Louis Lagrange discovered five special points in the vicinity of two orbiting masses where a third, smaller mass can orbit at a fixed distance from the larger masses.

 

 

The L2 point lies on the line defined by the two large masses, beyond the smaller of the two. Here, the gravitational forces of the two large masses balance the centrifugal force on the smaller mass.

 

Example: On the side of the Earth away from the Sun, the orbital period of an object would normally be greater than that of the Earth. The extra pull of the Earth's gravity decreases the orbital period of the object, and at the L2 point that orbital period becomes equal to the Earth's.

The Sun–Earth L2 is a good spot for space-based observatories. Because an object around L2 will maintain the same orientation with respect to the Sun and Earth, shielding and calibration are much simpler.

 

The L2 point of the Earth-Sun system is home to the WMAP spacecraft and (perhaps by the year 2011) the James Webb Space Telescope.

 

 

WMAP is collecting high-quality science data in its L2 orbit. The science team has produced the most detailed version a full sky map of the faint anisotropy or variations in the temperature of the cosmic microwave background radiation. An overview of the Five Year Results is on this site. Or actual data is available on the LAMBDA Archive site for study and analysis.

 

The cosmic microwave temperature fluctuations from the 5-year WMAP data seen over the full sky. The average temperature is 2.725 Kelvin (degrees above absolute zero; equivalent to -270 C or -455 F), and the colors represent the tiny temperature fluctuations, as in a weather map. Red regions are warmer and blue regions are colder by about 0.0002 degrees.

 

 

If current ideas about the origin of large-scale structure are correct, then the detailed structure of the cosmic microwave background fluctuations will depend on the current density of the universe, the composition of the universe and its expansion rate. WMAP has been able to determine these parameters with an accuracy of better than 5%. Thus, we can estimate the expansion age of the universe to better than 5%. When we combine the WMAP data with complimentary observations from other CMB experiments (ACBAR and CBI), we are able to determine an age for the universe closer to an accuracy of 1%.

 

The expansion age measured by WMAP is larger than the oldest globular clusters, so the Big Bang theory has passed an important test. If the expansion age measured by WMAP had been smaller than the oldest globular clusters, then there would have been something fundamentally wrong about either the Big Bang theory or the theory of stellar evolution. Either way, astronomers would have needed to rethink many of their cherished ideas. But our current estimate of age fits well with what we know from other kinds of measurements: the Universe is about 13.7 billion years old!