FOR a few years now, astronomers have been quietly confident that the universe is 13.7 billion years old, give or take a hundred million years. They are about to learn that the size and age of the universe are not a done deal.
Norbert Przybilla of the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, Germany, and his colleagues used the 10-metre Keck-II telescope on Mauna Kea, Hawaii, and other telescopes to measure the distance to a so-called eclipsing binary star system in the Triangulum galaxy, also known as M33. The team measured light, velocity and temperature to find the true luminosity of the two…
