How old is the Universe?

  You would expect that by now we have a rather good idea and until recently most scientists would have answered 13.6 billion years. 

  Then things started to go wrong.

  Already with the Hubble Space Telescope we were seeing galaxies fully formed a few hundred million years after the birth of the Universe. Strange but not impossible.

  Then we sent the James Webb Telescope into orbit. A more powerful machine working in the infrared light specter. And what we were afraid of happened. We are now seeing objects born "before" the official beginning of the place. 

  Something's wrong but what is it? 

  In fact as for almost everything in science, the closer you look the more you realize that we do not understand as much as we think. 

  When we looked at galaxies we could see that they were rotating. Then we measured the rotation and horror, the exterior of galaxies is rotating almost as fast as the center. According to the Newton laws, this should not be. So we invented Dark matter. We do not know what it is but it has to be there otherwise Newton was wrong!

  When Hubble observed what at the time was called nebulas, he discovered that they were much farther away than we thought and consequently could not belong to our galaxy. They were themselves galaxies. An infinity of them! The way he calculated the distance was by observing the red-shift and by doing so found that the Universe was expanding according to what we latter called the Hubble constant. But horror, the speed of expansion was much faster than justified by what we could see and compute. So we invented Dark Energy. We do not know what it is but it must be there otherwise Einstein made a mistake somewhere! 

  Then we found the cosmic background which somehow justified our Big Bang theory. Victory was close... but the radiation was strangely flat so we invented inflation. A time in the early Universe when the expansion of the Universe was much faster than the speed of light, almost infinitely faster. "How could this be?" You may ask. Well don't! We really don't know... but it must be otherwise our models of the Universe do not work.  

  And now finally this news that in fact could have been predicted a few years ago. We are seeing structures which are older than the Universe. Now "Houston, we have a problem!" What are they, we don't know. But either our calculations are wrong or they should not be there. (My personal guess is that the calculations based on red-shift are wrong 30% or the Universe is much older than we believe 70%)  

  Why do I give a higher probability to the second option? Well, we have another problem with age and a much, much bigger one. We can calculate relatively accurately the age of stars based on their composition. We have done this for almost 50 years and the science here is rather accurate. And slowly we started seeing very old stars, red dwarves in the range of over 10 billion years of age. They could just fit within the range of our expectations. That is until we found the Methuselah star. A star, located about 200 light-years away in our galaxy which is at least 1 billion years older than the Universe!   

  So here you go: An object which is at least 13.8 billion years at the edge of the Universe and a star which is over 14 billion years. Both uncomfortably wobbling in a 13.6 billion years old Universe. Many others will follow in short order. However you look at it, our science must change. (And I think it is a good thing because as you may remember, the "old" science belonged to the European Union technocrats. Hopefully the new science won't! 😀)