The Age of the Universe

[Michael]

The "confusion" factor in terms of age/size of the universe in Lambda-CDM is their fault, not yours. It is caused by astronomers constant misuse of Doppler shift as a justification for their redshift claims/interpretation. Doppler shift is related to moving objects. If Doppler shift were their "actual" explanation for photon redshift, the universe could not be more than twice it's age times the speed of light. Since they *actually* (bait and switch) created an aetherical like substance called 'space' that supposedly does the 'expanding', they aren't limited by the speed of light anymore. The speed of 'space expansion' is the magic trick that allows them to calculate a size of a universe that is larger than twice the speed of light times it's age.

 

[SpiritRehab]

Interesting. I didn't know that gravity had that much of an effect on the speed of light. Can I have sources?

Just to clarify, Gravity doesn't affect the speed of light, but the velocity of light. Light is assumed to travel at the same speed, in varying gravity fields, but it covers more distance over time, because time itself is passing slower or faster there, due to the gravity, than it is here on Earth.

Sources:
NOVA - Light Speed Varying Based on Temperature
Lene Hau - Research Physicist who made the discovery
Slow & Speed Up Light - Live Science Article
Dr. Russell Humphreys - Videos, info on Gravity & Time & Light

 

[JacksBratt]

Why do scientists maintain that the universe is only 13.8 billion years old even though objects can be observed to be 46 billion light years away?

You will notice that I did not ask why objects can be observed to be 46 billion light years away.

I am asking why scientists maintain that the universe is only 13.8 billion years old.

Ok, I'll jump back into the river full of starving Piranha....

The speed of light has been slowing down It has been measured for many centuries and it continued to slow down until, don't quote me on this as the exact year, but around 1962. Then it leveled off, flat lined.

Many wondered, why is it continually slowing down until this magic date....

Well the magic date was when the atomic clock was either invented or put into play as the standard time piece.
What happens when you measure the speed of light with an instrument that is goverened by the speed of light?
What happens is.... as the speed of light slows down, so does the clock. Therefore it seems like the speed of light remained constant.

Voila. The speed of light was much faster in the years thousands of years before us.
Don't take my word for it. Clammer through all the scientific babble as they try to deny it and look for the gems of actual facts where you will see that it is a fact.

 

[JacksBratt]

Just to clarify, Gravity doesn't affect the speed of light, but the velocity of light. Light is assumed to travel at the same speed, in varying gravity fields, but it covers more distance over time, because time itself is passing slower or faster there, due to the gravity, than it is here on Earth.

Sources:
NOVA - Light Speed Varying Based on Temperature
Lene Hau - Research Physicist who made the discovery
Slow & Speed Up Light - Live Science Article
Dr. Russell Humphreys - Videos, info on Gravity & Time & Light

No disrespect meant here but the speed of light is, as they have found, affected by gravity. The atomic clocks that are at different altitudes are actually not in sync as they should be due to their altitude and the strength of gravity at these altitudes. The affect is minute but it is obvious...

Again, don't take my word, do some research. A lot of times the controversy and denial of a new discovery is directly proportional to the unwillingness of scientists to accept the ramifications of the facts discovered and, surprise surprise, how it affects the TOE.

 

[Loudmouth]

Ok, I'll jump back into the river full of starving Piranha....

The speed of light has been slowing down It has been measured for many centuries and it continued to slow down until, don't quote me on this as the exact year, but around 1962. Then it leveled off, flat lined.

Many wondered, why is it continually slowing down until this magic date....

Many people wonder why creationists keep using this refuted argument.

http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/c-decay.html

 

[madschipperke]

I'd love to see where you get the 40 billion+ light years from.

 

[Loudmouth]

No disrespect meant here but the speed of light is, as they have found, affected by gravity. The atomic clocks that are at different altitudes are actually not in sync as they should be due to their altitude and the strength of gravity at these altitudes. The affect is minute but it is obvious...

Again, don't take my word, do some research. A lot of times the controversy and denial of a new discovery is directly proportional to the unwillingness of scientists to accept the ramifications of the facts discovered and, surprise surprise, how it affects the TOE.

The speed of light is the same in all frames of reference.

 

[KenBrace]

The universe is not as old as the farthest star is from us. God placed all of the stars where he wanted them to be all at ones. They were immortal. Satan made the stars mortal have the universe be like it is today. Allah is the one who did that. Allah is Lucifer who made the galaxies to look like they have smoke in them.

Do you have evidence for any of that?

 

[JacksBratt]

The speed of light is the same in all frames of reference.

You need to keep up.... science and time wait for no man...... check out the latest information.

 

[[serious]]

Yes a measurement of time light takes to travel, in a straight path, and a measurement of distance. Time- 1 regular year. It is a measurement of time.

so yes saying something is 46 billion lightyears away, means light took 46 billion years to get there, FROM OUR PERSPECTIVE, and is 46 billion times 6 trillion miles away.

BUT we all know the faster you travel, the slower time is. So while from our perspective it took 1 year for light to travel 6 trillion miles, for the light, it took CONSIDERABLY less.


So yes you would think, oh the furthest thing away to my left is 46 billion lightyears away, and to my right is 44 lightyears away... so the universe must be 90 billion years old, if the speed of light cannot be increased past the speed we know it as.

And it would be 90 billion years old, from our perspective. BUT from its perspective? Its said a human can, if traveling close to the speed of light, travels away from earth, and then returns, he will of lived thousands of earth, and see the earth year 3000, or 4000, even though he was born in the year 2000 for example.


so this planet 46 billion lightyears away, has been traveling for 46 billion lightyears from our perspective but from its perspective it might be only 4 billion years old.

The whole definition of age of the universe is whats at fault, because
from whose perspective is it coming from?

I hope this explained it.

And bible can be quite literal... take 1 day at 50 times the speed of light lol. you'd be living mabye millions of years from anothers perspective. Who knows how fast God was going on the first, second, third day etc.

Also if you see the bible creation story, and see the dozens of different hominid fossils/bones around, it doesn't take much to perceive the 6th day creation, and the Adam genesis story, as separate stories occurring at separate times. Why else is Abel marked so no one else could hurt him, as he is turned away to wonder the earth that would have no hominids unless they are in fact 2 separate feets at 2 separate times.

It looks like you are conflating two distinct concepts. Relativity does affect time, but that isn't what gets to the 46 billion. From the relativity perspective, what we see when we look at a star a million light years away is what happened a million years ago. As we get further out, there is another factor that begins to dominate.That would be the expansion of space itself. This does not affect time as far as i know, but merely stretches out distance.

 

[[serious]]

No disrespect meant here but the speed of light is, as they have found, affected by gravity. The atomic clocks that are at different altitudes are actually not in sync as they should be due to their altitude and the strength of gravity at these altitudes. The affect is minute but it is obvious...

Again, don't take my word, do some research. A lot of times the controversy and denial of a new discovery is directly proportional to the unwillingness of scientists to accept the ramifications of the facts discovered and, surprise surprise, how it affects the TOE.

Clocks -> time
Speed of light -> speed

Relativistic effects on time don't suggest alteration of the speed of light. In fact, relativistic effects are a predicted result of relativity (hence the name) which holds that the speed of light is invariant in all inertial reference frames.

 

[dcarrera]

Why do scientists maintain that the universe is only 13.8 billion years old even though objects can be observed to be 46 billion light years away?

You will notice that I did not ask why objects can be observed to be 46 billion light years away.

I am asking why scientists maintain that the universe is only 13.8 billion years old.

I am a PhD student in astrophysics, so I hope I can give you a helpful answer.

Light has a finite speed. When you look at something, you are looking at the past. We cannot see a "present day" galaxy that is 46 billion light years away. We can only see a younger version of that galaxy. We can see the way that galaxy looked (say) 13 billion years ago. We measure the expansion of the universe and INFER that by now that galaxy must be (say) 46 billion light years away. But this is entirely an inference. For all we know the galaxy might no longer exist (i.e. it could have been destroyed or could have merged with another galaxy).

To know the age of the universe, we need to know the rate at which the universe is expanding, and the strength of the force of gravity trying to slow down the expansion of the universe. Here is a nice diagram from Wikipedia:

The Omega value is the mass-energy density of the universe. In very rough terms, it gives you the force of gravity.

I hope this helps.

 

[Loudmouth]

You need to keep up.... science and time wait for no man...... check out the latest information.

The speed of light has been the same in all frames of reference since Einstein first rolled out Relativity. Differences in velocity between frames result in red or blue shifts for light. The speed of light stays the same.

 

[dcarrera]

Mind you that I don't believe the universe is only 13.7 billion years old, but the 'claim' is that "space" does magical expansion tricks somewhere very inconvenient for humans to reach, and in spite of the fact that space expansion never occur on Earth, thus allowing mass/energy to expand faster than light speed. It's pure bunk of course, but that's the claim.

The expansion is an observational fact. Even if we had no idea why the expansion happens, we can SEE that it happens. In any case, Earth is not exempted from the expansion; it just isn't significant for something so small. On the scale of the Earth the expansion is about 0.5mm/year which a lot less than the escape speed of the Earth.

 

[dcarrera]

The problem with this perspective (and every perspective has its issues) is that it is based on an assumption that taking the Milky Way galaxy as our point of reference (which we almost cannot avoid) it measures all things in relation to this focal point....it is kind of like (similar to but more sophisticated) the old idea of we being the center of the Universe. Red shifting (one of the measures of how fast the Universe is expanding) is somewhat deceptive because the measure does not usually include the actual speed (only relative) at which we are moving AWAY FROM the object...

Note that we can measure the speed of our galaxy with respect to the cosmic microwave background. We do have a sense of how fast galaxies move inside a galaxy group. It is true that for relatively nearby galaxies, the random motions of galaxies (including our own) is the dominant component of the observed redshift. But as you look at more distant galaxies, the expansion of the universe accumulates and becomes the dominant component. On a cosmic scale, the distant galaxies we observe are moving at a fraction of the speed of light.

 

[dcarrera]

How is billions of billions of billions of miles of distance calculated?

What is the reference point? Using trignometry, the angle would be so small, any results would be inaccurate.

I am a PhD student in astronomy, so I hope I can give a clear answer to your question. In astronomy we use a "distance ladder" that works roughly like this:

1) Use trigonometry for stars in our region of the galaxy.

2) In that region, we discover stars called Cepheids that pulsate. Because we know the distance (by trigonometry) we discover that pulsation period is related to the luminosity of the star.

3) Then we discover Cepheids in another galaxy. Because we see the pulsation period, we infer what its luminosity must be. Compare that to the brightness that we see on Earth and you get the distance to the Cepheid, and hence, to the galaxy.

4) In nearby galaxies we discover a type of supernova that has a very uniform luminosity. This is type "Ia". We know this because we know the distance to the galaxy thanks to the Cepheid.

5) Type Ia supernovae are very bright, so they can be seen in very distant galaxies. Since we know how bright they are, we can compare with the brightness we see on Earth and infer the distance.

The full story is more complex. There are several other methods that overlap in other ways, so you can compare the answers from different methods. But the basic idea is that you begin with trigonometry and learn other things that you can use to infer distances farther away. With each step, the measurements become more uncertain. This is why historically the measurement of the expansion of the universe has come with very large uncertainties.

With the advent of space satellites that measure the cosmic microwave background (CMB), we have been able to measure properties of the universe more directly. For example, the shape of the variations in the CMB allows us to measure the curvature of the universe. The details are difficult, and they are outside my field. The point I want to convey is that the "13.8 billion year" calculation is not based on distances to galaxies; it is based on the CMB.

Hope that helps.

 

[dcarrera]

By making 'space' do the magical expansion thing, rather than claiming that objects are actually *moving*, they are no longer limited in terms of expansion speed by the speed of light. In their claim, it's not the objects that actually move, is a magical thing called "space" between them that's magically moving. That's how they get a universe that is larger than 2 x the speed of light in terms of it's diameter.

As an astronomer, I would like to chip in: We use Einstein's General Relativity (which includes the expansion of the universe) because that is the model that is best supported by evidence. If someone finds another model that works better than GR, we will switch to that. But note that GR has been tested extensively, and as weird as it sounds, we do have evidence that space really is a stretchy malleable thing. We can measure this right here on Earth (using satellites). We have even measured the effect of the Earth dragging space around it as it rotates.

 

[dcarrera]

The "confusion" factor in terms of age/size of the universe in Lambda-CDM is their fault, not yours. It is caused by astronomers constant misuse of Doppler shift as a justification for their redshift claims/interpretation. Doppler shift is related to moving objects.

I have met many astronomers, and I do not know of any that calls it "Doppler" shift. As you said, Doppler shift is related to moving objects. We use the terms "red shift" and "blue shift". But no astronomer should ever say "Doppler" unless he is actually talking about Doppler.

Since they *actually* (bait and switch) created an aetherical like substance called 'space' that supposedly does the 'expanding', they aren't limited by the speed of light anymore. The speed of 'space expansion' is the magic trick that allows them to calculate a size of a universe that is larger than twice the speed of light times it's age.

Why would we be so interested in doubling the size of the universe? Really, why would I even care if it is two times larger or two times smaller? Especially since we have no freakin idea how big it is anyway. For all we know it could be infinite in size, which makes the "factor of 2" argument kind of pointless.

 

[Daniel Sylon]

All right guys, here is my answer.

I am going to answer the question from the standpoint of a biblical view.
The Bible has all the answers that we will ever need, including some questions of science, so all that we need to do is trust Him, and our lives will follow suit, so that we will have no need to ask questions.

I am basing my answer from the Answers In Genesis organization, cited here: https://answersingenesis.org/astronomy/starlight/does-distant-starlight-prove-the-universe-is-old/
And here: https://answersingenesis.org/astronomy/starlight/distant-starlight-thesis/

Please

 

[Doveaman]

i feel like I'm repeating myself, but yes. The age of the universe was calculated based on the hubble constant, (earlier estimates based on oldest known stars and best models of stellar evolution of the time exist) the frequency of the CMB was calculated based on these ages.

You said earlier that the 13.6 billion age of the universe had no special relevance to 13.6 as a distance, but yet the hubble constant is about speed proportional to distance.

That might explain why you keep repeating yourself.