How old is the universe
How old is the universe
Table of Contents
1. Introduction
Note from the editorial team: As a policy SSRF publishes articles that are more practical, so that people can learn from them and improve their lives. Understanding creation is mostly a theoretical endeavour and has little to no practical value in our spiritual journey. Hence, please consider this article about how old is the universe as simply a supplement to the articles in which we have mentioned the universe. Here we have shared just a few pertinent points with regard to the topic, to remove any ambiguity in the other articles that refer to the universe.
2. Definition of the universe
To understand how old is the universe, at the outset let us define what SSRF means by the universe. SSRF defines the universe as the entire seen and unseen world. This means it includes the Earth along with the solar system, all the constellations and the galaxies that we see in the sky. But this too is just a fraction of the universe. Along with this, it also includes the seven negative subtle-planes of existence and the six positive subtle-planes of existence as given in our article what happens after death.
3. How old is the universe
To understand this section about how old is the universe, there is a basic spiritual law of creation that one should be familiar with. Everything in the universe including the universe itself, is first created, then sustained for a period of time, and finally destroyed. Creation, sustenance and dissolution of the universe and its elements are continuous processes which have been taking place since time immemorial.
Through spiritual research to determine how old is the universe, we have found that the entire universe has gone through many such cycles of being created, sustained and then destroyed. The partial destruction of the universe is known as pralay and we have explained this in more detail in the sections below.
After the universe is created and before it is destroyed, (i.e. during the time it is sustained) it goes through many cycles. The smallest of these cycles has 4 Eras. They are Satyayug, Tretayug, Dwaparyug and Kaliyug.
To understand how old is the universe, through spiritual research, we have found that the following are the number of years each of these eras in a cycle last for:
| Eras in one cycle (paryāy) | |
|---|---|
| Era | Years |
| Satayug | 1,728,000 |
| Tretāyug | 1,296,000 |
| Dwāparyug | 864,000 |
| Kaliyug | 432,000 |
| Total | 4,320,000 1 |
Footnotes:
In the current cycle (paryay), as of the year 2017, we are approximately 5119 years into the era of Kaliyug (translated as the Era of Strife). Therefore, since the current cycle began, we have traversed through roughly a little over 3.8 million years and we still have over 420,000 years to go. At the end of Kaliyug, there is a mini-dissolution before Satyayug starts again. The mini-dissolution is mostly about extensive destruction such as war, natural disasters, loss of life, etc. The level of destruction is fractional as compared to the dissolution of the universe which is known as pralay.
One of the key differences in these Eras is the level of sāttviktā in society and the average spiritual level of humankind. The following chart shows the mode spiritual level of humankind in each Era in a cycle.
| Spiritual level of human kind in each era | |
|---|---|
| Era | Average spiritual Level as a percentage |
| Satayug | 80% |
| Tretāyug | 70% |
| Dwāparyug | 50% |
| Kaliyug | 20% |
4. Main cycles of the universe
To understand further how old is the universe, the following are the other main cycles in time that the universe goes through:
4.1 Destruction or dissolution of the universe
The following are the types of dissolution/destruction that take place in the universe periodically:
4.1.1 Pralay (every 4.32 billion years)
4.1.2 Mahapralay (every 432 billion years)
5. Differences between modern science’s view and the spiritual science view on how old is the universe
Modern science maintains that the universe is over 13 billion years old (wikipedia.com). The main reason for the difference between modern science’s view and the Knowledge received through spiritual research is the lack of sixth sense ability (as compared to Saints) to understand the principle of Creation, Sustenance and Destruction of the universe.
6. Miscellaneous points on how old is the universe and humankind
The following are some other pertinent points that explains how old is the universe, through spiritual research.
Q: How long did Earth take to reach its current state where it was populated by human beings?
A: Once the universe becomes visible to the naked eye it manifests in its entirety immediately. There was no gestation period before Earth became inhabitable and Satyayug started.
Q: When did people populate the Earth?
A: People populated the Earth from the very beginning in the start of Satyayug. They did not evolve from primates or other species as is a popular concept embraced by modern science. For example, we did not evolve from Homo Neanderthalensis also known as the Neanderthal Man. The Neanderthal Man was from a different species.
The main difference between human beings in Satyayug and Kaliyug is the difference in the average spiritual level which is 80% and 20% respectively. As the sāttviktā in Satyayug was greater, the rate of destruction/aging was slower. For example, the people in Satyatug had very long lives (400 years on average), were very tall, etc. However, the lifespan of humans in Kaliyug has reduced (70-80 years), also the average height of the people has reduced. Whenever there are greater amounts of Raja and Tama subtle-components as in Kaliyug, the ageing and rate of destruction increases.
The following table gives a few more aspects about the four eras.
| Aspect | Satyayug | Trētāyug | Dwāparyug | Kaliyug |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Percentage of people evolved beyond 70% | 70% | 50% | 20% | 0.000001 / Negligible |
| Proportion of merits to sins | ||||
| Sins | 2% | 20% | 40% | 80% |
| Merits | 98% | 80% | 60% | 20% |
Species such as dinosaurs have existed in many different cycles before. In this cycle too they may have existed upto some eras such as Tretayug, and then became extinct. It is the same as with taller human beings. Subtle-bodies reincarnate as human beings again and again throughout the eras, until they are liberated from the cycle of birth and death by doing spiritual practice. Similarly, the animals have also become smaller in Kaliyug and some of the species have become extinct. But they will reappear in the next cycle.
How Old is the Universe?
By Nola Taylor Tillman published 8 June 17
Age may only be a number, but when it comes to the age of the universe, it’s a pretty important one. According to research, the universe is approximately 13.8 billion years old. How did scientists determine how many candles to put on the universe’s birthday cake? They can determine the age of the universe using two different methods: by studying the oldest objects within the universe and measuring how fast it is expanding.
Age limits
The universe cannot be younger than the objects contained inside of it. By determining the ages of the oldest stars, scientists are able to put a limit on the age.
The life cycle of a star is based on its mass. More massive stars burn faster than their lower-mass siblings. A star 10 times as massive as the sun will burn through its fuel supply in 20 million years, while a star with half the sun’s mass will last more than 20 billion years. The mass also affects the brightness, or luminosity, of a star; more massive stars are brighter. [Related: The Brightest Stars: Luminosity & Magnitude]
Known as Population III stars, the first stars were massive and short-lived. They contained only hydrogen and helium, but through fusion began to create the elements that would help to build the next generation of stars. Scientists have been hunting for traces of the first stars for decades.
«Those stars were the ones that formed the first heavy atoms that ultimately allowed us to be here,» David Sobral, an astronomer from the University of Lisbon in Portugal, said in a statement. Sobral was part of a team that identified a bright galaxy with evidence of Population III stars.
«The detection of dust in the early universe provides new information on when the first supernovae exploded and hence the time when the first hot stars bathed the universe in light,» ESO officials said in a statement. «Determining the timing of this ‘cosmic dawn’ is one of the holy grails of modern astronomy, and it can be indirectly probed through the study of early interstellar dust.»
Early stars aren’t the only way to place limits on the age of the universe. Dense collections of stars known as globular clusters have similar characteristics. The oldest known globular clusters have stars with ages that appear to be between 11 and 14 billion years old. The wide range comes from problems in pinpointing the distances to the clusters, which affects estimates of brightness and thus mass. If the cluster is farther away than scientists have measured, the stars would be brighter, thus more massive, thus younger than calculated.
«Just like archaeologists use fossils to reconstruct the history of the Earth, astronomers use globular clusters to reconstruct the history of the galaxy,» Andrea Kunder told Space.com. «There are only about 150 globular clusters known in the Milky Way Galaxy, so each of these globular clusters is an important tracer of the galactic halo and the formation of the Milky Way Galaxy.»
The uncertainty still creates a limit to the age of the universe; it must be at least 11 billion years old. It can be older, but not younger.
Expansion of the universe
The universe we live in is not flat and unchanging, but constantly expanding. If the expansion rate is known, scientists can work backwards to determine the universe’s age, much like police officers can unravel the initial conditions that resulted in a traffic accident. Thus, finding the expansion rate of the universe — a number known as the Hubble constant — is key.
A number of factors determine the value of this constant. The first is the type of matter that dominates the universe. Scientists must determine the proportion of regular and dark matter to dark energy. Density also plays a role. A universe with a low density of matter is older than a matter-dominated one.
To determine the density and composition of the universe, scientists rely on missions such as NASA’s Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) and The European Space Agency’s Planck spacecraft. By measuring the thermal radiation left over from the Big Bang, missions such as these are able to determine the density, composition and expansion rate of the universe. The leftover radiation is known as the cosmic microwave background, and both WMAP and Planck have mapped it. [INFOGRAPHIC: Cosmic Microwave Background: Big Bang Relic Explained]
In 2012, WMAP estimated the age of the universe to be 13.772 billion years, with an uncertainty of 59 million years. In 2013, Planck measured the age of the universe at 13.82 billion years. Both of these fall within the lower limit of 11 billion years independently derived from the globular clusters, and both have smaller uncertainties than that number.
NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope has also contributed to narrowing down the age of the universe by reducing the uncertainty of the Hubble constant. Combined with the WMAP measurements, scientists were able to make independent calculations of the pull of dark energy.
«Just over a decade ago, using the words ‘precision’ and ‘cosmology’ in the same sentence was not possible, and the size and age of the universe was not known to better than a factor of two,» Wendy Freedman of the Observatories of the Carnegie Institution for Science in Pasadena, California, said in a statement. Freedman lead the study that used Spitzer to refine the Hubble constant. «Now we are talking about accuracies of a few percent. It is quite extraordinary.»
Editor’s Note: This article was updated on Jan. 8, 2019 to reflect a correction. The original article stated that the oldest stars have been estimated to be up to 18 billion years old.
How old is the universe? Our answer keeps getting better.
After thousands of years, we’re getting more consistent age estimates.
By Charlie Wood | Published Aug 2, 2021 1:01 PM
In milliseconds, Google can serve up a fact that long eluded many of humanity’s deepest thinkers: The universe is nearly 14 billion years old—13.8 billion years old to be exact. And many cosmologists continue to grow more confident in that number. In late December of 2020, a collaboration of researchers working on the Atacama Cosmology Telescope (ACT) in Chile published their newest estimate, 13.77 billion years, plus or minus a few tens of millions of years. Their answer matches that of the Planck mission, a European satellite that made similar observations between 2009 and 2013.
The precise observations of ACT and Planck come after more than a millennium of humans watching the sky and pondering where it all could have come from. Somehow, primates with lifespans of less than a century got a handle on events that took place eons before their planet—and even the atoms that would form their planet—existed. Here’s a brief account of how humanity came around to figure out how old the universe is.
Antiquity: The beginning of creation
Every culture has a creation myth. The Babylonians, for instance, believed the heavens and the Earth to be hewn from the carcass of a slain god. But few belief systems specified when existence started existing (one exception is Hinduism, which teaches that the universe reforms every 4.3 billion years, not so far off from the actual age of the Earth).
The idea that stuck, at least in the west, came from the Greek philosophers, and it was actually something of a scientific step back. In the fourth and third centuries BCE, Plato, Aristotle, and other philosophers went all in on the notion that the planets and stars were embedded in eternally rotating celestial spheres. For the next millennium or so, few expected the universe to have an age at all.
1600 to 1900: The end of infinity
Astronomer Johannes Kepler realized in 1610 that one major crack in the popular Greek-inspired cosmology had been staring star gazers in the face all along. If an eternal universe hosted an infinite number of stars, as many had come to believe, why didn’t all those stars fill the universe with a blinding light? A dark night sky, he reasoned, suggested a finite cosmos where the stars eventually peter out.
The clash between the night sky and the infinite universe became known as Olber’s paradox, named after Heinrich Olber, an astronomer who popularized it in 1826. An early version of the modern solution came, of all people, from the poet Edgar Allan Poe. We experience night, he speculated in his prose poem Eureka in 1848, because the universe is not eternal. There was a beginning, and not enough time has elapsed since then for the stars to fully light up the sky.
1900s: The modern and early universes come into view
But the resolution to Olber’s paradox took time to sink in. When Einstein’s own theory of gravity told him that the universe likely grew or shrank over time in 1917, he added a fudge factor into his equations—the cosmological constant—to get the universe to hold still (allowing it to endure forever).
Meanwhile, larger telescopes had brought clearer views of other galaxies to astronomers’ eyepieces, prompting a fierce debate over whether they were looking at far-off “island universes,” or nearby star clusters inside the Milky Way. Edwin Hubble’s keen eyes settled the argument in the late 1920s, measuring intergalactic distances for the first time. He found that not only were galaxies immense and distant objects, they were also flying away from each other.
The universe was expanding, and Hubble clocked its expansion rate at 500 kilometers per second per megaparsec, a constant that now bears his name. With the expansion of the universe in hand, astronomers had a powerful new tool to look back in time and gauge when the cosmos started to grow. Hubble’s work in 1929 pegged the universe at expanding in such a way that it should be roughly 2 billion years old.
“The expansion rate is telling you how fast you can rewind the history of the Universe, like an old VHS tape,” says Daniel Scolnic a cosmologist at Duke university. “If the rewind pace is faster, then that means the movie is shorter.”
But measuring the distances to far-flung galaxies is messy business. A cleaner method arrived in 1965, when researchers detected a faint crackling of microwaves coming from every direction in space. Cosmologists had already predicted that such a signal should exist, since light emitted just hundreds of thousands of years after the universe’s birth would have been stretched by the expansion of space into lengthier microwaves. By measuring the characteristics of this Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB), astronomers could take a sort of snapshot of the young universe, deducing its early size and contents. The CMB served as unassailable evidence that the cosmos had a beginning.
“The most important thing accomplished by the ultimate discovery of the [CMB] in 1965 was to force us all to take seriously the idea that there was an early universe,” wrote Nobel prize laureate Steven Weinberg in his 1977 book, The First Three Minutes.
1990 to present: Refining the calculation
The CMB let cosmologists get a sense of how big the universe was at an early point in time, which helped them calculate its size and expansion today. Scolnic likens the process to noting that a child’s arm appears one foot long in a baby picture, and then estimating the height and growth speed of the corresponding adolescent. This method gave researchers a new way to measure the universe’s current expansion rate. It turned out to be nearly ten times slower than Hubble’s 500 kilometers per second per megaparsec, pushing the moment of cosmic genesis further back in time. In the 1990s, age estimates ranged from 7 to 20 billion years old.
Painstaking efforts from multiple teams strove to refine cosmology’s best estimate of the universe’s expansion rate. Observations of galaxies from the Hubble Space Telescope in 1993 pegged the current Hubble constant at 71 kilometers per second per megaparsec, narrowing the universe’s age to 9 to 14 billion years.
Then in 2003, the WMAP spacecraft recorded a map of the CMB with fine features. With this data, cosmologists calculated the universe’s age to be 13.5 to 13.9 billion years old. About a decade later, the Planck satellite measured the CMB in even more detail, getting a Hubble constant of 67.66 and an age of 13.8 billion years. The new independent CMB measurement from ACT got basically the same numbers, further bolstering cosmologists’ confidence that they know what they’re doing.
“Now we’ve come up with an answer where Planck and ACT agree,” said Simone Aiola, a cosmologist at the Flatiron Institute and member of the ACT collaboration, in a press release. “It speaks to the fact that these difficult measurements are reliable.”
Up next: A cosmological conflict
But as measurements of the early and modern universes have gotten more precise, they’ve started to clash. While studies based on the CMB baby picture suggest a Hubble constant in the high 60s of kilometers per second per megaparsec, distance measurements of today’s galaxies (which Scolnic compares to a cosmic “selfie”) give brisker expansion rates in the low to mid 70s. Scolnic participated in one such survey in 2019, and another measurement based on the brightness of various galaxies came to a similar conclusion (that the modern universe is speedily expanding) in January 2021.
Taken at face value, the faster rates these teams are getting could mean that the universe is actually around a billion years younger than the canonical 13.8 billion years from Planck and ACT.
Or, the mismatch may hint that something deeper is missing from cosmologists’ picture of reality. Connecting the CMB to the present day involves assumptions about the poorly understood dark matter and dark energy that appear to dominate our universe, for instance, and the fact that the Hubble constant measurements aren’t lining up could indicate that calculating the true age of the universe will involve more than just rewinding the tape.
“I am not certain about how we are deriving the age of the universe,” Scolnic says. “I’m not saying that it’s wrong, but I can’t say it’s right.”
Charlie is a journalist covering developments in the physical sciences both on and off the planet. In addition to Popular Science, his work has appeared in Quanta Magazine, Scientific American, The Christian Science Monitor, and other publications. Previously, he taught physics and English in Mozambique and Japan, and studied physics at Brown University. You can view his website here.
How Old is the Universe?
Until recently, astronomers estimated that the Big Bang occurred between 12 and 14 billion years ago. To put this in perspective, the Solar System is thought to be 4.5 billion years old and humans have existed as a genus for only a few million years. Astronomers estimate the age of the universe in two ways: 1) by looking for the oldest stars; and 2) by measuring the rate of expansion of the universe and extrapolating back to the Big Bang; just as crime detectives can trace the origin of a bullet from the holes in a wall.
Older Than the Oldest Stars?
Astronomers can place a lower limit to the age of the universe by studying globular clusters. Globular clusters are a dense collection of roughly a million stars. Stellar densities near the center of the globular cluster are enormous. If we lived near the center of one, there would be several hundred thousand stars closer to us than Proxima Centauri, the star nearest to the Sun.
Text Link to the HST press release describing this image
The life cycle of a star depends upon its mass. High mass stars are much brighter than low mass stars, thus they rapidly burn through their supply of hydrogen fuel. A star like the Sun has enough fuel in its core to burn at its current brightness for approximately 9 billion years. A star that is twice as massive as the Sun will burn through its fuel supply in only 800 million years. A 10 solar mass star, a star that is 10 times more massive than the Sun, burns nearly a thousand times brighter and has only a 20 million year fuel supply. Conversely, a star that is half as massive as the Sun burns slowly enough for its fuel to last more than 20 billion years.
All of the stars in a globular cluster formed at roughly the same time, thus they can serve as cosmic clocks. If a globular cluster is more than 20 million years old, then all of its hydrogen burning stars will be less massive than 10 solar masses. This implies that no individual hydrogen burning star will be more than 1000 times brighter than the Sun. If a globular cluster is more than 2 billion years old, then there will be no hydrogen-burning star more massive than 2 solar masses.
The oldest globular clusters contain only stars less massive than 0.7 solar masses. These low mass stars are much dimmer than the Sun. This observation suggests that the oldest globular clusters are between 11 and 18 billion years old. The uncertainty in this estimate is due to the difficulty in determining the exact distance to a globular cluster (hence, an uncertainty in the brightness (and mass) of the stars in the cluster). Another source of uncertainty in this estimate lies in our ignorance of some of the finer details of stellar evolution. Presumably, the universe itself is at least as old as the oldest globular clusters that reside in it.
Extrapolating Back to the Big Bang
An alternative approach to estimating is the age of the universe is to measure the Hubble constant. The Hubble constant is a measure of the current expansion rate of the universe. Cosmologists use this measurement to extrapolate back to the Big Bang. This extrapolation depends on the history of the expansion rate which in turn depends on the current density of the universe and on the composition of the universe.
If the universe is flat and composed mostly of matter, then the age of the universe is
where Ho is the value of the Hubble constant.
If the universe has a very low density of matter, then its extrapolated age is larger:
If the universe contains a form of matter similar to the cosmological constant, then the inferred age can be even larger.
Many astronomers are working hard to measure the Hubble constant using a variety of different techniques. Until recently, the best estimates ranged from 65 km/sec/Megaparsec to 80 km/sec/Megaparsec, with the best value being about 72 km/sec/Megaparsec. In more familiar units, astronomers believe that 1/Ho is between 12 and 14 billion years.
An Age Crisis?
If we compare the two age determinations, there is a potential crisis. If the universe is flat, and dominated by ordinary or dark matter, the age of the universe as inferred from the Hubble constant would be about 9 billion years. The age of the universe would be shorter than the age of oldest stars. This contradiction implies that either 1) our measurement of the Hubble constant is incorrect, 2) the Big Bang theory is incorrect or 3) that we need a form of matter like a cosmological constant that implies an older age for a given observed expansion rate.
Some astronomers believe that this crisis will pass as soon as measurements improve. If the astronomers who have measured the smaller values of the Hubble constant are correct, and if the smaller estimates of globular cluster ages are also correct, then all is well for the Big Bang theory, even without a cosmological constant.
WMAP Can Measure the Age of the Universe
Measurements by the WMAP satellite can help determine the age of the universe. The detailed structure of the cosmic microwave background fluctuations depends on the current density of the universe, the composition of the universe and its expansion rate. As of 2013, WMAP determined these parameters with an accuracy of better than than 1.5%. In turn, knowing the composition with this precision, we can estimate the age of the universe to about 0.4%: 13.77 ± 0.059 billion years!
How does WMAP data enable us to determine the age of the universe is 13.77 billion years, with an uncertainty of only 0.4%? The key to this is that by knowing the composition of matter and energy density in the universe, we can use Einstein’s General Relativity to compute how fast the universe has been expanding in the past. With that information, we can turn the clock back and determine when the universe had «zero» size, according to Einstein. The time between then and now is the age of the universe. There is one caveat to keep in mind that affects the certainty of the age determination: we assume that the universe is flat, which is well supported by WMAP and other data. If we relax this assumption within the allowed range, the uncertainty increase a bit. Inflation naturally predicts a very nearly flat universe.
The expansion age measured by WMAP is larger than the oldest globular clusters, so the Big Bang theory has passed an important test using data independent of the type collected by WMAP. 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.
How Old is the Universe?
But how old is the Universe? Or at least, in general? Many consider that the age of our Universe is 13.8 billion years. Some believe it is even older than that, while others, younger.
However, most astronomers agree that our Universe is at least 13.8 billion years old. But don’t expect that number to last for long, as we still have much more to learn.
How do They Know the Universe is 13.8 Billion Years Old?
For example, the oldest planet ever discover is Methuselah, which is around 14.5 billion years, give or take 800 million years. This is a paradox since it would be older than our Universe. Its star is clearly even older than this planet, since stars form first, and planets later.
One of the oldest galaxies ever discovered is GN-z11, which is 32 billion light-years away from us, and it is estimated to be at least 13.4 billion years old.
It is theorized to have formed shortly after the Big Bang. Astronomers calculate the age of the Universe by analyzing the distances and radial velocities of other galaxies. The cosmic microwave background is also factored into this, as it is a relic of the radiation leftover from the Big Bang.
Everything is calculated based on rewinding events back to the Big Bang. However, one thing is sure; nothing is certain regarding our Universe. You will know what I mean if you read on.
Can the Universe be Older than 14 Billion Years?
The Universe might well be older than 14 billion years, and we should stop putting a limit on it every time something new is discovered. Take, for example, the Hercules-Corona Borealis Great Wall.
This is one of the largest structures discovered in our Universe. It has over 10 billion light-years in length, and it is located well over 9 billion light-years away from us.
The observable Universe is 93 billion light-years across. The existence of the Hercules-Corona Borealis Great Wall, its size, is quite controversial.
This is because it is too big to have formed in the amount of time its light has reached us, and it may well one day prove that the Universe is even older than we think it is.
This large structure will remain a mystery for scientists for an extended period of time. Some even doubt its existence due to its paradoxical nature.
However, even if we take out the existence of the Great Wall, many scientists agree that our Universe should be at a maximum age of 14.5 billion years. This is the limit placed on the age of the Universe, but it remains to be seen.
What is Older than the Universe?
In theory, the star HD 140283, or the Methuselah star, seems to be older than our Universe, but that would be an impossibility. It is either an error of calculus or an error of our Univers’s estimated age.
No matter how you look at it, nothing should be older than our Universe, except perhaps something which occurred before the Big Bang. We don’t actually know what was before the Big Bang, but whatever it was, we might, at least in theory, consider it slightly older than our Universe.
The Big Bang, the event which created our Universe, was started by the existence of an initial singularity, which, in itself, might be considered older than our Universe.
Another thing that may be older than our Universe would be the existence of another Universe. If we ever find out that other Universes exist outside our own, they or it might well be younger or older than our Universe.
How Old is the Earth Compared to the Universe?
