Universe ages 80M years; Big Bang gets clearer

[dipsydoodle]

PARIS (AP) -- New results from a look into the split second after the Big Bang indicate the universe is 80 million years older than previously thought but the core concepts of the cosmos - how it began, what it's made of and where it's going - seem to be on the right track.

The findings released Thursday bolster a key theory called inflation, which says the universe burst from subatomic size to its now-observable expanse in a fraction of a second.

The Big Bang is the most comprehensive theory of the universe's beginning. It says the visible portion of the universe was smaller than an atom when, in a split second, it exploded, cooled and expanded rapidly, much faster than the speed of light.

The European Space Agency's Planck space probe looked back at the afterglow of the Big Bang, and those results have now added about 80 million years to the universe's age, putting it 13.81 billion years old.

http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/B/BIRTH_OF_THE_UNIVERSE?SITE=AP&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT&CTIME=2013-03-21-08-10-51

[R. Daneel Olivaw]

1. Smaller than an atom. Faster than light. Are they relatively sure about that?

Planck shows that inflation is proving to be the best explanation for what happened just after the Big Bang, but that doesn't mean it is the right theory or that it even comes close to resolving all the outstanding problems in the theory, Efstathiou said.

Does this give rise more to a Brane/Bulk possibility? That would seem to explain an extremely fast acceleration to "observable universe" size. We're talking about 81 billion trillion miles, right?

How would one explain that light is the fastest speed now compared to the beginning? Wouldn't everything just fly apart with the notion of a single point theory? What would explain the breaking of such an incredible expanse down to light speed?

[longship]

3. Because expansion is not limited by the speed of light.

Since it is space itself that is expanding. Relativity only limits speeds of mass traveling through space. Space itself is still allowed to expand at any speed.

There is no violation of relativity.

[R. Daneel Olivaw]

5. Einstein stated that thre is nothing faster than the speed of light.

Last edited Thu Mar 21, 2013, 03:05 PM - Edit history (1)

Even light traveling in separate directions is only calculable by the speed of light and not 2x light.

Is there any explainable reason/theory...so far why the big bang would create such a scenario as going from nothing to the size of the observable universe?

[longship]

6. Sorry, not exactly correct.

I apologize for not making it clearer. Let me try to make it clear.

Special relativity specifies the dynamics of massive bodies traveling in a non-inertial frame, meaning no acceleration. General relativity extends that to inertial frames.

The key term here is massive. Relativity says that only bodies with mass cannot go light speed. In fact, massless bodies must always travel at light speed. E.G., photons.

Now, the expansion of the universe does not apply since it is not the bodies traveling through space that is being measured but the expansion of the totality of space. Therefore, relativity does not apply even though it might be possible for two bodies, separated by great distance, to be so far apart that the expansion between them has them makes their relative velocity faster than light speed. The particles might not be moving through space; it's the space between them which is stretching.

It's very complex measuring distances between two objects in an expanding universe. Please don't ask me to explain that, because every time I think about it, my brain hurts.

Hope I've helped. You might try Google for a possible better, more professional, response.

[DreamGypsy]

2. Inflation was REALLY rapid for a REALLY short time...

From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inflation_%28cosmology%29 (had to muck with the exponents since they didn't copy/paste correctly):

In physical cosmology, cosmic inflation, cosmological inflation or just inflation is the theorized extremely rapid exponential expansion of the early universe by a factor of at least 10 to the 78th in volume, driven by a negative-pressure vacuum energy density.[1] The inflationary epoch comprises the first part of the electroweak epoch following the grand unification epoch. It lasted from 10 to the -36 seconds after the Big Bang to sometime between 10 to the ?33 and 10 to the?32 seconds. Following the inflationary period, the universe continued to expand, but at a slower rate.

The term "inflation" is also used to refer to the hypothesis that inflation occurred, to the theory of inflation, or to the inflationary epoch. The inflationary hypothesis was originally proposed in 1980 by American physicist Alan Guth, who named it "inflation".[2] It was also proposed by Katsuhiko Sato in 1981.[3]

As a direct consequence of this expansion, all of the observable universe originated in a small causally connected region. Inflation answers the classic conundrum of the Big Bang cosmology: why does the universe appear flat, homogeneous, and isotropic in accordance with the cosmological principle when one would expect, on the basis of the physics of the Big Bang, a highly curved, heterogeneous universe? Inflation also explains the origin of the large-scale structure of the cosmos. Quantum fluctuations in the microscopic inflationary region, magnified to cosmic size, become the seeds for the growth of structure in the universe (see galaxy formation and evolution and structure formation)

As to the speed of light question...inflation was an expansion of space itself, any photons or other particles (quarks) just went along for the ride.

[DreamGypsy]

4. Yet another bogus title for a popular science article!

Universe ages 80M years - bah humbug!!

Here's another 'real' science article (from Nature) that reports the same results, http://www.nature.com/news/planck-telescope-peers-into-the-primordial-universe-1.12658:

The Planck space telescope has delivered the most detailed picture yet of the cosmic microwave background, the residual glow of the Big Bang.

Scientists unveiling the results from the €600 million European Space Agency (ESA) probe said that they shed fresh light on the first instants of our Universe’s birth. They also peg the age of the Universe at 13.81 billion years — slightly older than previously estimated.

“For cosmologists, this map is a goldmine of information,” says George Efstathiou, director of the Kavli Institute for Cosmology at the University of Cambridge, UK, one of Planck’s lead researchers.

Planck’s results strongly support the idea that in the 10-32 seconds or so after the Big Bang, the Universe expanded at a staggering rate — a process dubbed inflation.

Here is a similar statement about similar data gathered by NASA's WMAP probe from around 2008:

Measurements by the WMAP satellite can help determine the age of the universe. The detailed structure of the cosmic microwave background fluctuations depends on the current density of the universe, the composition of the universe and its expansion rate. As of 2013, WMAP determined these parameters with an accuracy of better than than 1.5%. In turn, knowing the composition with this precision, we can estimate the age of the universe to about 0.4%: 13.77 ± 0.059 billion years!

How does WMAP data enable us to determine the age of the universe is 13.77 billion years, with an uncertainty of only 0.4%? The key to this is that by knowing the composition of matter and energy density in the universe, we can use Einstein's General Relativity to compute how fast the universe has been expanding in the past. With that information, we can turn the clock back and determine when the universe had "zero" size, according to Einstein. The time between then and now is the age of the universe. There is one caveat to keep in mind that affects the certainty of the age determination: we assume that the universe is flat, which is well supported by WMAP and other data. If we relax this assumption within the allowed range, the uncertainty increase a bit. Inflation naturally predicts a very nearly flat universe.

The WMAP age of the Universe is 13.71 to 13.83 BY. The PLANCK update is 13.81 BY (with no error analysis provided), so within the range of the estimate from previous data.

WMAP and PLANCK both study the details of cosmic background microwave radiation.

http://www.nature.com/polopoly_fs/7.9618.1363863233!/image/Planck_CMB_node_full_image.jpg_gen/derivatives/fullsize/Planck_CMB_node_full_image.jpg

Yeah, before these probes were launched the age of the universe was estimated to be around 14 +/- .7 BY or using other even earlier estimating techniques between 10 to 20 BY. Astronomers are just refining the window.

[RagAss]

7. Space would only expand if there were objects that needed separation.

Therefore, objects(even subatomic ones) must have been closely behind the expanding barrier of space itself.