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DrMaxwellEdison t1_jb34z1i wrote

Reply to comment by Aseyhe in Does the age of the universe depends on where you are? by _bidooflr_

A follow up question, if I may.

Is there some consensus on a more precise age for the universe than "13.7 billion"? Certainly it's not something that matters in the context of our own life spans, but at some point that 13.7 has to go up. Like the joke of a guard working in a museum who says a dinosaur is 65 million and 4 years old, because it was 65 million when they started working there 4 years ago.

So, is there some agreed-upon starting point we can count up from?

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Aseyhe t1_jb47564 wrote

The Planck 2018 paper gives 13.787 ± 0.020 billion years, so that's an uncertainty of 20 million years. That's from the cosmic microwave background.

However, supernova-based measurements of cosmic expansion favor about a 7% higher expansion rate, which could imply the universe is younger by of order a billion years. This discrepancy is the "Hubble tension", a major current research topic.

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