From a mountain high in Chile’s Atacama Desert, astronomers with the National Science Foundation’s Atacama Cosmology Telescope (ACT) have taken a fresh look at the oldest light in the universe. Their new observations plus a bit of cosmic geometry suggest that the universe is 13.77 billion years old, give or take 40 million years.
The new estimate matches the one provided by t…
Author: Dan Tamayo
In February of this year, a European-led team of astronomers announced that TRAPPIST-1, one of the 300 nearest stars to us, hosts seven Earth-like planets. Several of these could have the right temperatures to host liquid water, and are thus prime candidates in the search for life outside our solar system.
But a puzzle in the original paper was that when they tried to…