CH200: Age of the Universe

Claim CH200:

Response:

1. The age of the earth is 4.5 billion years.
   
   
2. The universe is shown to be old by several independent types of measurements:
   
   
   • We can measure the distances to some types of stars from their apparent brightness. (We know their absolute brightness from nearby stars of the same type whose distances can be measured geometrically.) We find distances more than fifty million light-years away, which means the universe must be at least 50 million years old for the light to reach us. Measurements based on the brightness of supernovae and galaxies, although less accurate, give distances up to billions of light years.
   • The Large Magellanic Cloud is 153,000 light years away, as measured by an eclipsing binary star (Cole 2000). This method gives a relatively direct measurement from simple observations. A star's absolute brightness is determined from its temperature and diameter, which can be determined from its spectrum and length of eclipse. Distance is then determined from the apparent brightness.
   • The orbits of thirteen of the Koronis family of asteroids were traced back and found to match 5.8 million years ago, suggesting that they formed then from a collision of larger asteroids (Nesvorny et al. 2002)
   • The ages of stars in the oldest globular clusters puts a lower limit on the age of the universe at 12.07 billion years (Chaboyer et al. 1996).
   • There are white dwarf stars found to be twelve to thirteen billion years old, based on their cooling rate.

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