Some astrophysicists assure that the cosmos was born at least 15,000 million years ago, and others believe that its age does not exceed 8,000 million. The reason for this dance of figures lies mainly in the value, yet to be determined with exactitude, of a cosmological constant known as the Hubble constant (Ho), formulated by Edwin Hubble in 1929. According to this, the galaxies are moving away from the ours -the Milky Way- at a speed directly proportional to the distance of the observer. For Allan Sandage, of the Carnegie Observatories, in the United States, the value of the constant is 57 kilometers per second and megaparsec (one megaparsec is equivalent to 3,260,000 light years), therefore the age of the universe would be 15,000 million years . This data contrasts with that recently presented by the American researcher Wendy Freedman, who gives a value for Ho of 80 kilometers per second and megaparsec, which gives an age of 8,000 million years . The debate is served.
How old is the universe?
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