Light

The new telescope makes them think the universe is 26 billion light years not 13.

London scientists what if light traveled a a different speed before?

Increasing the universe’s age could help explain some long-standing cosmological quandaries, as well as some new ones discovered by NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). One of the oldest stars known to science, fittingly named Methuselah is, by some estimates, somehow older than the known universe. Obviously, that is impossible, though margins of error could place it before the Big Bang. And Methuselah isn’t the only cosmological anomaly. New JWST data also revealed at least six galaxies way too massive for how early they formed in the Universe’s past.

This wouldn’t be the first time that scientists have revised the universe’s age—in the 1920s, Edwin Hubble thought the universe was only 2 billion years old. But our calculations have only gotten better over time, and doubling the universe’s age is quite the leap.

So, only time will tell if astronomers revise the universe’s age based on Gupta’s work. But whether humanity’s recorded story represents only 10 seconds or 5 seconds, the fact remains—the universe is an old and amazing place.

The basis for the new study, published in Royal Society Open Science, is a massive online repository of more than 2000 distinct tales from different Indo-European cultures known as the Aarne–Thompson–Uther Index, which was compiled in 2004. Although not all researchers agree on the specifics, all modern Indo-European cultures (encompassing all of Europe and much of Asia) descended from the Proto-Indo-European people who lived during the Neolithic Period (10,200 B.C.E.–2000 B.C.E.) in Eastern Europe. Much of the world's modern language is thought to have evolved from them.

To conduct the study, Jamshid Tehrani, an anthropologist at Durham University in the United Kingdom, and colleagues scanned the repository. They limited their analysis to tales that contained magic and supernatural elements because this category contained nearly all the famous tales people are familiar with. This narrowed the sample size to 275 stories, including classics such as Hansel and Gretel and Beauty and the Beast.

For at least two decades, astronomers have mostly agreed that the universe is around 13.7 billion years old.But the ages of super-old stars and the masses of early galaxies provide compelling evidence that the estimate could be off.A new study from the University of Ottawa uses a theory of “tired” light and coupling constants to calculate a new age of the universe—26.7 billion years.