Slashdot Mirror
The 'Humble Space Telescope' Successfully Launched
frank249 writes "CTV News is reporting that Canada's first space telescope was successfully launched into orbit as part of a multiple payload mission from Plesetsk, Russia, on an SS-19 based launch vehicle called Rockot.
The MOST (nick named the 'Humble' due to its tiny size) set off Monday on a mission to answer a question common to astronomers, physicists, and those of us who just like to gaze up at the stars: How old is the universe? There was a previous article on Slashdot in Dec 2001 but it is nice to see it finally in orbit especially as today is also Canada Day."
Reading this a couple of days ago when the article about the timeline of space discorveries came on
In addition, the new portrait precisely pegs the age of the Universe at 13.7 billion years old, with a remarkably small one percent margin of error.
So I'm not really all that sure what "humble" is trying to find out...
There are different ways of estimating the age of the Universe. We can, for instance, measure the ages of the oldest stars in the Universe, which then sets a lower bound on the Universe's age. Or, we can measure cosmological parameters (such as the Universe's expansion rate, geometry, and energy content) that theory tells us should be related to the age of the Universe in a certain way that one can calculate mathematically.
None of these, by itself, is adequate for estimating the age of the Universe for the simple reason that we astrophysicists might be wrong. We might be wrong in our understanding of old stars, and thus in our techniques for determining their ages. We might be wrong in our theoretical cosmological models, and thus in our equations relating the age of the Universe to observed cosmological parameters. But if we try several independent approaches, and they all say pretty much the same thing, that makes us more confident that we're on the right track -- not only about the age of the Universe, but about the sets of assumptions that go into the different methods (since then they'd all be either close to correct, or all wrong in just such a way as to produce the same wrong answer for the age of the Universe, which is very unlikely).
So, despite the fact that cosmic microwave background observations have produced a very precise estimate of the age of the universe, it's still important to look at it from other directions.
Isn't everything inadequate for estimating anything for the simple reason that people might be wrong?
That's why multiple completely different methods with different theoretical underpinnings are being used. It is far less likely that all are wrong than that any single approach is.