Somewhat shame on Science Daily for this title. The actual article title is "JWST early Universe observations and ΛCDM cosmology," which is quite a bit more accurate. This isn't a research result. It's a proposed model that was created specifically to fit data that isn't adequately explained by current models. It has made no other novel predictions or been corroborated in any way. The current ΛCDM model took years of data collection by multiple teams to even be formulated at all and eventually had multiple lines of evidence from many different areas of research all corroborate it. We don't just overhaul paradigms and change the age of the universe because one team did some math that explains one otherwise unexplained phenomenon.
I really, really wish science journalists could be as intellectually humble and conservative as the actual scientists.
Read The Extravagant Universe if you want one of the great all-time tales of experimental physics, describing the lengths to which astronomers go to collect data, how long it takes, and how reluctant they were to even claim they were explaining anything until they were absolutely sure, straight from the hand of one of the astronomers leading the collection team that discovered dark energy.
> The current ΛCDM model took years of data collection by multiple teams to even be formulated at all and eventually had multiple lines of evidence from many different areas of research all corroborate it.
I guess this is why it's also dubbed "Concordance Model".
Even at double the previous estimate the thing that always floors me about the age of the universe is that it's a number that's approachable by human minds at all.
it could have been anything, trillions upon trillions of years, or subject to some nonlinear behavior that made it impossible to estimate at all in terms of current parameterizations of time.
And yet here it is a number we can almost see to the end of,conceptually, at the fringes of human scale reckoning.
Somewhat loosely related is the equally arbitrary-seeming and surprisingly small number of chemical elements, vs, say the uncountable number of living species.
My suspicion is there is a lot of things like this.
I’m surprised it’s already shifted from what felt like a fact, 13.7 billion to double that. It’s not an insignificant change.
What is amusing is now all the arguments that reference the 13.7 billion years start to sound kind of exaggerated.
I mean did it now take 26 billion years for life to evolve ? It sounds absurd to my little mind.
Personally I don’t think time and evolution are really worth comparing. I don’t think it matters how long or how little something takes to evolve. For me this news just makes that more concrete.
I don't really buy this. That is like 819900000000000000 seconds.
Squaring this number gets you 672236010000000000000000000000000000 seconds.
I feel like my mind doesn't really appreciate either of these numbers or the difference between them. I feel like we just use units that we are comfortable with to make the number readable but there is not easy intuition here.
This should fit in a modern 64bit CPU register right? I find it amazing that our CPUs can model the estimated age of the universe in such a simple way.
Sounds speculative --although not necessarily in a bad way.
What's the evidence for the proposed change of the coupling constants? If the observational evidence is that this changing of the coupling constants explains certain observations related to very old galaxies and stars, would it be possible to infer other early Universe observations that could be performed to confirm this hypothesis?
It’s pretty misleading label for the estimate. It’s the age you get when you reverse extrapolate current physics to the point where current bodies converge in space and time.
It’s possible space and time continue beyond that extrapolation point. No one knows.
I think the previous numbers were the non overlapping 13.813±0.038 and 13.772±0.059 billion years. For some reason a lot of popular science when talking about the age of the universe cite numbers nowhere near either of those, I'm not sure why that is. Someone might want to write an article about the history of that.
I'm wondering if this requires different fundamental constants or constants that were different during the radiation-dominated era. The fine-structure constant has been steady for some few billions of years.
I really, really wish science journalists could be as intellectually humble and conservative as the actual scientists.
Read The Extravagant Universe if you want one of the great all-time tales of experimental physics, describing the lengths to which astronomers go to collect data, how long it takes, and how reluctant they were to even claim they were explaining anything until they were absolutely sure, straight from the hand of one of the astronomers leading the collection team that discovered dark energy.