The Universe is 13.73 +/- .12 billion years old! | Bad Astronomy | Discover Magazine

The Universe is 13.73 +/- .12 billion years old! | Bad Astronomy | Discover Magazine: "WMAP Results

A lot of this information was determined a while back, just a couple of years after WMAP launched. But now they have released the Five Year Data, a comprehensive analysis of what all that data means. Here’s a quick rundown:

1) The age of the Universe is 13.73 billion years, plus or minus 120 million years. Some people might say it doesn’t look a day over 6000 years. They’re wrong.

2) The image above shows the temperature difference between different parts of the sky. Red is hotter, blue is cooler. However, the difference is incredibly small: the entire temperature range from cold to hot is only 0.0002 degrees Celsius. The average temperature is 2.725 Kelvin, so you’re seeing temperatures from 2.7248 to 2.7252 Kelvins.

3) The age of the Universe when recombination occurred was 375,938 years, +/- about 3100 years. Wow.

4) The Universe is flat.

5) The energy budget of the Universe is the total amount of energy and matter in the whole cosmos added up. Together with some other observations, WMAP has been able to determine just how much of that budget is occupied by dark energy, dark matter, and normal matter. What they got was: the Universe is 72.1% dark energy, 23.3% dark matter, and 4.62% normal matter. You read that right: everything you can see, taste, hear, touch, just sense in any way… is less than 5% of the whole Universe."

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Read the entire article, quite interesting and fairly simple. Understanding or accepting that God chose such a fascinating method of creation limits God in some way for some people. They would rather view a God who waived some magic wand producing everything instantaneously and unexplainably. Well, in a way He did in Big Bang fashion. In BHT's eyes, the God who can orchestrate this vast creation, micro-tuning it over billions of years (as a sort of pastime hobby) is mind blowingly huge. God said (in the Bible) that if we looked at nature we would see Him. Sure enough, the more we look the more we see ... God.

In case you missed it, 95+% of the universe is made up of "stuff" that no one can see and no one understands. Just in case you believe "they" have everything pretty much figured out. But a lot is being understood and it is all amazing.

Take a gander at just the "little" Milky Way Galaxy.
Check out the Hubble Site.
It could be wrong. (But never small)

However God did it, I am impressed.