Is The Universe Getting Younger?

Though the new figure might yet be “too old” to satisfy America’s staunchest far-right Creationists, is our universe much, much younger than it really is?

By: Ringo Bones

America’s staunchest far-right Creationist may be buying their time, just waiting for a scientific consensus proving that the entire universe began in 9 o’clock in the morning Greenwich Mean Time on the 23^rd of October 4004 BC. Even the Creationist US Secretary Of State Mike Pompeo was probably elated to hear that the universe could be 2 billion years younger than it actually is. Will it be a matter of time that the universe is proven to be only 6,000 years old to the delight of America’s far-right Creationists and white nationalists?

Scientists estimate the age of the universe by using the movement of stars to measure how fast it is expanding. If the universe is expanding faster, that means it got to its current size more quickly and therefore must be relatively younger. The expansion rate called the Hubble Constant makes for a fast moving – and younger – universe. The generally accepted age of the universe is 13.7 billion years based on a Hubble Constant of 70. But lately a team of astronomers from the Max Plank Institute led by Inh  Jee came up with a Hubble Constant of 82.4, which would put the age of the universe at around 11.4 billion years.

It is somewhat disconcerting that while our understanding of our universe has vastly increased during the past 50 years while that same understanding told us that the universe was much younger than what we knew before. Remember the time when the scientific consensus was that the whole universe is a little over 18 billion years old? Then by the latter half of the 1990s, when the prior discovery and / or conjecture of the concept of dark matter and dark energy a few years before has slashed the age of the universe to 13.8 billion years. And now it is only a little over 11 billion years old. Could the 6,000 year old age of the universe embraced by America’s far-right Creationists, white nationalists and Trump supporters be proven during Mike Pompeo’s lifetime?