Universal Truths.

COSMOCHRONOLOGY; QUASARS; GALAXIES; ASTROPHYSICS; ASTRONOMICAL spectroscopy; METAPHYSICAL cosmology; ASTRONOMERS

The article looks at how astronomers, using 3,000 recently discovered quasars as searchlights on the distant universe, mapped with unprecedented precision the distribution of the diffuse gas between galaxies. By combining these measurements with observations of the faint microwave glow of radiation left over from the Big Bang and other cosmological data, the researchers report that they have pinned down the age of the universe to an accuracy 5 times greater than ever before. By their reckoning, the cosmos is 13.6 billion years old, give or take 200 million years. All the quasars lie between 8 billion and 10 billion light-years from Earth and represent a population 100 times that used in any previous analysis of intergalactic gas. As a quasar's light traverses the billions of light-years that lie between its home galaxy and Earth, some of the radiation is absorbed by intervening clumps of hydrogen gas. Each parcel of gas shows up as a different dip in the quasar's spectrum. The spacing and depth of these dips indicate several key properties of the universe. Studying the spectra of quasars to reveal the distribution of either gas or galaxies in the universe isn't a new endeavor. But until now, no study has used enough quasars to generate a reliable mapping of the intergalactic gas.