Azerbaijan National Academy of Sciences

The universe is about 13.8 billion years old, according to new research recently published by an international team of astrophysicists.

While this estimate of the age of the universe had been known before, in recent years, other scientific measurements had suggested instead that the universe may be hundreds of millions of years younger than this.

The scientists studied an image of the oldest light in the universe to confirm its age of 13.8 billion years.

This light, the "afterglow" of the Big Bang, is known as the cosmic microwave background and marks a time 380,000 years after the universe’s birth when protons and electrons joined to form the first atoms.

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