New research puts age of universe at 26.7 – not 13.7 – billion years (opens in new tab)

Somewhat shame on Science Daily for this title. The actual article title is "JWST early Universe observations and ΛCDM cosmology," which is quite a bit more accurate. This isn't a research result. It's a proposed model that was created specifically to fit data that isn't adequately explained by current models. It has made no other novel predictions or been corroborated in any way. The current ΛCDM model took years of data collection by multiple teams to even be formulated at all and eventually had multiple lines of evidence from many different areas of research all corroborate it. We don't just overhaul paradigms and change the age of the universe because one team did some math that explains one otherwise unexplained phenomenon.

I really, really wish science journalists could be as intellectually humble and conservative as the actual scientists.

Read The Extravagant Universe if you want one of the great all-time tales of experimental physics, describing the lengths to which astronomers go to collect data, how long it takes, and how reluctant they were to even claim they were explaining anything until they were absolutely sure, straight from the hand of one of the astronomers leading the collection team that discovered dark energy.

Even at double the previous estimate the thing that always floors me about the age of the universe is that it's a number that's approachable by human minds at all.

it could have been anything, trillions upon trillions of years, or subject to some nonlinear behavior that made it impossible to estimate at all in terms of current parameterizations of time.

And yet here it is a number we can almost see to the end of,conceptually, at the fringes of human scale reckoning.

Somewhat loosely related is the equally arbitrary-seeming and surprisingly small number of chemical elements, vs, say the uncountable number of living species.

Sounds speculative --although not necessarily in a bad way.

What's the evidence for the proposed change of the coupling constants? If the observational evidence is that this changing of the coupling constants explains certain observations related to very old galaxies and stars, would it be possible to infer other early Universe observations that could be performed to confirm this hypothesis?

It’s pretty misleading label for the estimate. It’s the age you get when you reverse extrapolate current physics to the point where current bodies converge in space and time.

It’s possible space and time continue beyond that extrapolation point. No one knows.

I think the previous numbers were the non overlapping 13.813±0.038 and 13.772±0.059 billion years. For some reason a lot of popular science when talking about the age of the universe cite numbers nowhere near either of those, I'm not sure why that is. Someone might want to write an article about the history of that.

I'm wondering if this requires different fundamental constants or constants that were different during the radiation-dominated era. The fine-structure constant has been steady for some few billions of years.

huge if true