May 25 1999
From The Space Library
An international team of astronomers, led by Wendy L. Freedman of the Carnegie Observatories, held a news conference to announce their findings regarding the age of the universe. Freedman's team had concluded that the universe was between 12 billion and 13.4 billion years old, at least 1 billion years younger than predicted. Freedman's international team had studied eight years of calculations, made observations using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope (HST), and used a range of celestial measurements to recalculate the age of the universe. Among those measurements was the "Hubble constant," used in mathematical equations to "gauge the speed at which galaxies are accelerating away from each other." Named for Edwin Hubble, who had discovered 70 years ago that the universe is expanding, the Hubble constant is an essential piece of the equation determining the age and size of the universe. The team's findings drew criticism from other astronomers. Although the Australian physicist Charles H. Lineweaver had conducted separate research with the same result as that of Freedman's team, some astronomers associated with the Carnegie Observatories and Harvard University did not agree with the Freedman team's conclusions. Allan Sandage of the Carnegie Observatories stated that he believed that the team's methodology contained systematic errors and that the final number was not correct. Harvard University astronomer Robert P. Kirshner had led a third team, using the Hubble constant to study the age of the universe, but although he calculated a different age than the other teams, Kirshner downplayed the differences in their results, remarking that "what was once a very big disagreement is now narrowing down.”
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