Off-duty Finest DWI rap
WASHINGTON — The universe is looking younger every day, it seems.
New calculations suggest the universe could be a couple billion years younger than scientists now estimate, and even younger than suggested by two other calculations published this year that trimmed hundreds of millions of years from the age of the cosmos.
The huge swings in scientists’ estimates — even this new calculation could be off by billions of years — reflect different approaches to the tricky problem of figuring the universe’s real age.
“We have large uncertainty for how the stars are moving in the galaxy,” said Inh Jee of the Max PlanckInstitute in Germany, lead author of the study in the journal Science.
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, is one of the most important numbers in cosmology. A larger Hubble Constant makes for a faster-moving — and younger — universe.
The generally accepted age of the universe is 13.7 billion years, based on a Hubble Constant of 70.
Jee’s team came up with a Hubble Constant of 82.4, which would put the age of the universe at around 11.4 billion years.
Jee used a concept called gravitational lensing — where gravity warps light and makes far away objects look closer.
They rely on a special type of that effect called time delay lensing, using the changing brightness of distant objects to gather information for their calculations.
But Jee’s approach is only one of a few new ones that have led to different numbers in recent years, reopening a simmering astronomical debate of the 1990s that had been seemingly settled.
In 2013, a team of European scientists looked at leftover radiation from the Big Bang and pronounced the expansion rate a slower 67, while earlier this year Nobel Prize winning astrophysicist Adam Riess of the Space Telescope Science Institute used NASA’s super telescope and came up with a number of 74.
And another team earlier this year came up with 73.3. An off-duty NYPD police officer was busted for drunkenly crashing into several parked cars and a bus stop on Staten Island, police said Saturday.
David Hansen, 31, was arrested around 11:30 p.m. Friday at Van Duzer St. and Beach St. in Stapleton after the latenight wreck.
The cop was charged with DWI and refusing to take a breathalyzer test.
The parked cars were unoccupied at the time of the crash and there were no injuries.