How old is the universe?
If you've ever gone camping and looked up at the stars at night, you've probably been amazed at how great it is.
On a clear night, you can see the depths of the universe, and this sometimes spurs some insight.
What are we really looking at when we look up into the starry night sky?
These are questions of astronomy, or even astrophysics.
Before we go any further, let us examine the origins of these extraordinary pursuits.
Initially, we have no idea at all.
Since the dawn of mankind and conscious thought, humans have shared similar experiences.
As times have passed, our knowledge of the universe has increased.
At first we thought we were at the center of the universe.
It is understood that everything revolves around planet Earth, and this is why the sun and moon leap over our horizon.
At this time, the earth was also widely believed to be flat.
Some time later, in 1514, a Polish astronomer named Nicolaus Copernicus distributed a handwritten manuscript with small comment titles.
Copernicus proposed that the Sun is the center of the universe, not the earth, and that the cycles of the sun and moon are due to the rotation of the Earth.
The result of Copernicus finally changed the way we checked the universe, because he was the first to use the approach to mathematical and physical combinations with astronomy.
Although this paved the way for future scientists, physicists and astronomers, it was not until the 17th century that Copernican theories were considered true.
How many million years old is the universe?
As scientific knowledge increases, so our thoughts turn to bigger questions about the universe.
By the 18th century, there were two main theories of the universe.
The first is that it is millions of years old.
A second theory, originally published in Sigur of Brabant's The Eternity of the World in the 13th century, holds that the universe has neither beginning nor end - it is eternal.
In the middle of the 19th century, our ideas about the universe of the century began to completely change.
Physicists began to develop the first theories of thermodynamics, a branch of physics related to temperature and heat.
Entropy's theory was established, saying that if the universe has no start or end, all have problems in it will have the same temperature.
This contradicts current theories, since it is now well known that there is a large temperature difference in the known universe.
It was not until the early 20th century that the works of eminent scientists such as Albert Einstein and Alexander Friedman theorized that the universe could not be in a stationary state and that it had to be really expanding or being.
Of course, this changed everything, and therefore new theories about the age of the universe had to be established.
Thanks to advances in telescope technology, we have been able to look deeper into space.
Around this time, one of the most important astronomers of all time, an American named Edwin Hubble, made observations of distant clusters of stars found to be other galaxies, like
Both Hubble and a Belgian astronomer named Georges Lemaître proposed and proved an established theory that the universe was in an expanding state.
As a direct result of this, we are starting to have some real understanding of the age of the universe.
Hubble hypothesized that the beginning of the universe was about 2 billion years old.
The universe is really billions of age!
Although Hubble was far ahead in his calculations, he paved the way to establish a more solid idea of the age of the universe.
To get an accurate understanding of the age of the universe, a law of physics known as the Hubble constant was established to measure the rate of the expansion of the universe.
Hubble's law is a real breakthrough, because it can be used in a complex equation along with the identified age of different galaxy bodies to measure the age of the universe.
Hubble was unable to perform calculations to determine the age of nearby galaxies, and so his idea of an age is much lower than it is today.
Thanks to the work of many scientists throughout the rest of the 20th and early 21st centuries, it has finally been determined that the age of the universe is actually in the tens of billions of years.
Also thanks to advances in spacecraft, probes from both NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA) were able to collect data on the background radiation left over from the Big Bang.
In 2012, NASA estimated the age of the universe to be 13.772 billion years old, and ESA determined it to be 13.82 billion years old in 2013.
Although we still do not know the exact age of the universe, we can be assured that we have a much deeper understanding of it.
Instead of the tens of billions of years difference between the theories of competition, there is now only a few percent difference.
So how old is the universe?