According to astronomers studying background radiation data
gathered by the Planck Space probe, the universe is 80-million
years older than previously thought. So now when somebody asks
you how old the universe is, you can confidently tell them,
"80-million years older than previously thought" because you
never knew the original figure in the first place. WTF are they
teaching in school these days? The Planck space probe looked
back at the afterglow of the Big Bang, and those results have
now added about 80 million years to the universe's age, putting
it at 13.81 billion years old. The findings released Thursday
bolster a key theory called inflation, which says the universe
burst from subatomic size to its now-observable expanse in a
fraction of a second. The probe, named for the German physicist
Max Planck, the originator of quantum physics, also found that
the cosmos is expanding a bit slower than originally thought,
has a little less of that mysterious dark energy than
astronomers had figured and has a tad