It is a question that has puzzled scientists throughout the ages: How old is our universe?
The question is simple enough, but over the years it has become clear that settling on an answer is not so easy. Even today, the issue is still open to debate as new research could at any moment upend our pre-age cosmological notion of the billions of galaxies that make up our universe.
That’s what happened last week when a new study was released that challenges the long-held notion that our universe is about 13.8 billion years old. If the results of this latest research prove accurate, the Big Bang may have occurred 26.7 billion years ago, making the actual age of the universe twice as old as we thought.
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How the ‘impossible early galaxy problem’ has undermined our understanding of the age of the universe
For years, astronomers and physicists have calculated the age of the universe mainly by measuring the time since the Big Bang and studying the oldest stars.
But study Posted July 7th In the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society he seems to confirm that previous estimates were widely off the mark. What is referred to in the new study as the “impossible early galaxy problem” has long puzzled scientists who have struggled to reconcile why some galaxies appeared so long after the Big Bang that they actually appear to be much older than the estimated age of the universe.
Observed through NASA’s James Webb telescope, galaxies and stars such as Methuselah It appears to have a level of maturity and mass usually associated with billions of years of cosmic evolution. It’s a remarkable observation considering it’s widely believed that they appeared hundreds of millions of years after the Big Bang.
but now, Rajendra GuptaThe University of Ottawa theoretical physicist who authored the study believes he can explain a long-puzzling mystery about these ancient galaxies.
“Our newly devised model extends the galaxy formation time by several billion years,” Gupta wrote.
How did the study determine that the universe could be 26.7 billion years old?
Calculating the time since the Big Bang is not the only way scientists have used to estimate the age of the universe.
the redshift of light — literally, light from distant galaxies has been stretched and shifted toward the red part of the spectrum — which has long helped physicists estimate the age of the universe. In simple terms, the thought was that redshift indicates the distance of stars and galaxies, and therefore, the farther away they are from Earth, the faster.
By estimating the rate at which stars are moving apart, scientists can calculate how fast space is expanding in an infinitely growing universe.
But the so-called “tired light theory” originated in 1929 with Swiss astronomer Fritz Zwicky offered an alternative explanation: the redshift we see may not be due to galaxies moving away from us. Instead, Zwicky’s hypothesis was that it might be because light lost its energy and luminosity after traveling a long distance.
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Gupta suggests that if we allow Zwicky’s theory to coexist with the idea of ​​an expanding universe, we can reinterpret the redshift as a combination of these two phenomena, and thus arrive at a more accurate estimate of the age of the universe.
Gupta goes further in the study, introducing the fundamental physics idea from English physicist Paul Dirac that pairing constants govern interactions between particles.
What does it mean? If these constants evolve, the time for the early galaxies observed with the Webb telescope would stretch from a few hundred million years to several billion years.
I prefer that it would provide an explanation for the advanced level of evolution and mass observed in previously puzzling early galaxies.
Eric Lagatta covers breaking news and trading for USA TODAY. Reach out to him at elagatta@gannett.com and follow him on Twitter @EricLagatta.
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