How old is the universe?
13.82 billion years old. This precise figure is thanks to the data collected by the Planck spacecraft, which was announced in March 2013. The previous best estimate was 13.73 billion years (give or take less than 1%), which came from the WMAP satellite. Both missions mapped out the Cosmic Microwave Background in unprecedented detail, allowing scientists to calculate the Hubble Constant. The Hubble Constant is the key value in the formula to calculate the age of the universe, which is related to the rate at which the universe is expanding. This is a very precise figure (less than 1% uncertainty), but until quite recently the best anybody could say for certain was “Somewhere between 10 and 20 billion years”.
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