The universe may have been lying about its age.
A new study suggests that the universe is a couple billion years younger than previous estimates.
“We have large uncertainty for how the stars are moving in the galaxy,” said Inh Jee, of the Max Plank Institute in Germany, lead author of the study in Thursday’s journal Science.
Scientists estimate the universe’s age by tracking the movement of stars to see how the universe is expanding. The faster the universe expands — called the Hubble constant — the younger it is. The higher the Hubble constant, the faster and younger the universe.
Jee’s team used measured the changing brightness of distant objects to fill out their calculations to land on a Hubble constant of 82.4 and an 11.4-billion-years old universe.
A NASA study released in 2012 estimated the universe as approximately 13.8 billion years old.
However, Jee’s margin of error is so large that it’s possible the universe could be even older than previously calculated, so this debate is hardly settled.