Age of Universe
I'm in the middle of composing a blog post—mostly in my head at this point—on the infamous Hubble constant and how distances are measured in astronomy and the implications said distances have on cosmology, but as that takes work, and work takes time and effort and focus, I'll instead let you know about some other fun stuff...
For example, the age of the universe is apparently increasing exponentially. First, it was thousands of years old because we could trace back the geneologies in the Bible and add up the years. But that first week is rather tricky, and then we started being able to date fossils, and, later, rock formations, which were milions of years old, and the age of the universe has to be at least as old as the age of the Earth. And then came Hubble and galaxies moving away from us and all sorts of things like that, and now the universe is billions of years old.
For your viewing convenience, I've replotted their data on a log plot:
1 comment:
Mark Twain has an essay on how the Mississippi river is getting longer, and with projections. There's a NASA paper showing how Pluto is getting smaller. This paper, written in the 70's (i think) predicted that by something like 2010, Pluto would be of zero size, and after that, would become imaginary in size. Very entertaining.
But seriously, at least the Universe is now old enough to contain the oldest stars.
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