What are the best current estimates of the age of the Universe and what makes up the Universe?
The exciting results from the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) have recently provided answers to these questions with unprecedented confidence. The age of the Universe is 13,700,000,000 years, give or take 200,000,000 years. WMAP measures the oldest light in the Universe, formed about 380,000 years after the Big Bang, at the time when atoms first formed (before that the Universe was so hot that atoms were not stable). This light started as ultra high energy gamma rays, but as the Universe has expanded, the light has cooled until now it is seen as the Cosmic Microwave Background. By itself, WMAP does not measure the constituents of the Universe. When combined with other observations, the WMAP data can be used to search for what the WMAP team calls the fingerprint of what the Universe is like. By looking at predictions of many theories and variations of theories, the WMAP Science Team found a best fit to all the available data. Dr. Charles Bennett, Principal Investigator for W
