The figure is based on estimates of the universe’s expansion. These days, most cosmologists are confident that happened about 13.85 billion years ago. This indicated that everything had begun in a hot, dense state: the big bang. Lemaître’s idea that everything there is was once contained in a single “primordial atom” was transformed in the 1960s, when astronomers discovered the most ancient light in the universe, the cosmic microwave background. In the mid-1920s, astrophysicist George Lemaître showed that according to the theory, the universe wasn’t static but expanding– and would thus have been smaller in the past. General relativity describes gravity, the force that sculpts the universe, as the result of mass warping its fabric, space-time. It was a neat way to sidestep the question of how it formed, and the idea had been enshrined in 1917 when Albert Einstein presented his model of a static universe through his general theory of relativity. Giacomo Gambineri HOW OLD IS THE UNIVERSE?Ī CENTURY ago, if you asked a cosmologist the universe’s age, the answer may well have been “infinite”.
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