Hubble Data Says Universe Is 14 Billion Years Old

no reason to be here writes "New data from the Hubble Space Telescope suggest that the age of the universe is approximately 14 billion years old. Read this press release for more info."

Comments

Happy Birthday!

[Transcendent]

finding the oldest stars puts astronomers well within arm's reach of calculating the absolute age of the universe

...May 14th?

Well I have a 1/365 chance of that being right!

The Universe is dying

[jbridge21]

It is official; NASA confirms: the Universe is dying

One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered scientific community when Berkeley confirmed that Universe inhabitability has dropped yet again, now down to less than a fraction of 1 percent of all stars. Coming on the heels of a recent NASA survey which plainly states that the Universe has lost more inhabitability, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. The Universe is collapsing in complete disarray, as fittingly exemplified by falling dead last in the recent Living Times comprehensive livability test.

You don't need to be an Einstein to predict the Universe's future. The hand writing is on the wall: the Universe faces a dark future. In fact there won't be any future at all for the Universe because the Universe is dying. Things are looking very bad for the Universe. As many of us are already aware, the Universe continues to lose brilliance. Red dwarfs are flowing like a river of blood. The Milky Way is the most endangered of them all, having lost 93% of its core supergiants.

Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.

Andromeda Galaxy leader Neo states that there are 7000 stars left in the Andromeda Galaxy. How many livable planets in the Crab Nebula are there? Let's see. The number of Andromeda Galaxy versus Crab Nebula readings on SETI@HOME is roughly in ratio of 5 to 1. Therefore there are about 7000/5 = 1400 Crab Nebula inhabitable planets. Horseshoe Nebula readings on SETI@HOME are about half of the volume of Crab Nebula readings. Therefore there are about 700 inhabitable planets in the Horseshoe Nebula. A recent article put the Milky Way at about 80 percent of the Universe market. Therefore there are (7000+1400+700)*4 = 36400 inhabitable planets in the Milky Way. This is consistent with the number of Milky Way SETI@HOME readings.

Due to the troubles of Grand Overlord Bush, abysmal immigration and so on, the Milky Way went out of business and was taken over by Virgo who sell another troubled galaxy. Now Virgo is also dead, its corpse turned over to yet another charnel house.

All major surveys show that the Universe has steadily declined in inhabitability. The Universe is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If the Universe is to survive at all it will be among interplanetary dilettante dabblers. The Universe continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save it at this point in time. For all practical purposes, the Universe is dead.

Fact: the Universe is dying

Re:The Universe is dying

[Tablizer]

(* We'll probably be very dead before the universe is. As such: I don't care....
Of course, it could be argued that the matter of the universe will re-form into a big ball to start the cycle over again. I think there is some debate as to how likely that is. *)

The best current estimate is that the Universe will continue to expand, and that several billions of years from now, inhabitants of our galaxy will only be able to see and access the galaxies within our "local cluster" and a few others IIRC (roughly about 50 galaxies?). The rest beyond that will eventually recede faster than the speed of light, riding on the expansion, so they are "gone" as far as we are concerned. But the local ones are gravitational buddies to end.

50 galaxies is plenty to provide humans with enough energy for another 500 billion years or so (very rough guess).

Thus, if we survive Earth's end and spread around to the nearby galaxies, we still have a lot of time.

I just hope there is no intergalactic bomb that terrorists can use to wipe out the remaining galaxies. (Triggering a super-gamma burst by colliding black holes and super-stars may be a possible bomb.)

I think terrorists and wars are the biggest threat, not the expanding universe. If anything, the expansion allows groups of humans to part such that groups can "ride out" the expansion so no terrorists can catch them. Groups can disappear beyond the "event horizon" of the expansion and never be touched again by outsiders as long as the speed of light cannot be surpassed.

Thus, this limits the scope of people that big-time terrorists and wars can kill.

IOW, expansion may be your distant offspring's best friend.

Well

[zulux]

I don't cary what you fancy-schmancy tele-scope in space says - Jack Chick says the this here universe is only 6000 years old.

Excuse me, while I go back to the trailer.