Gravitational Lensing Used to Measure the Age and Size of the Universe
By using entire galaxies as lenses to look at other more distant galaxies, a team of researchers at Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology, located on the Stanford University campus, have come up with a new way to measure the size and age of the universe. The team used a technique called gravitational lensing to measure the distance that light traveled from a bright, active galaxy to the earth along different paths. By understanding the time it took to travel along each path and the effective speeds involved, the researchers were able to infer not just how far away the galaxies are, but also the overall scale of the universe and some details of its expansion. The results confirm that the age of the universe is 13.75 billion years old, plus or minus 170 million years.
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