Name: john d colgren
Status: N/A
Age: N/A
Location: N/A
Country: N/A
Date: 1993 - 1999
Question:
Hello I'm a science teacher at plum grove. Recent reports on hubble
show the universe to be younger than some stars. How does this change thinking
on topics such as Big Bang?
Replies:
Well, it makes the Big Bang theory look a little more suspicious.
The Big Bang has been extremely successful in explaining various features of our
universe - the expansion, the background of microwaves permeating space, the
abundance of various elements.
So most likely every effort will be made to figure out how these new
measurements might fit into a Big Bang-like theory.
For example, our estimates of the ages of those old stars could be wrong, or
there could still be something funny about the Hubble measurement. At least the
numbers are coming out roughly in agreement - between 8 and 20 billion years for
the age of the universe and the age of those stars around 15 billion years. It w ould have been
really fatal if we thought those stars were 1 trillion years old, or if the
Hubble constant gave an age of only 1 million years for the universe!
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