Related papers: Do globular clusters time the Universe?
Globular clusters are the oldest conglomerates of stars in our Galaxy and can be useful laboratories to test theories from stellar evolution to cosmology. In this paper, we present a new method to estimate the absolute age of a globular…
In this article I review the main methods for determining the age of the Universe. I describe how to determine the age of the oldest known systems at z=0, the system of galactic globular clusters, using different techniques. I also describe…
A minimum age of the universe can be estimated directly by determining the age of the oldest objects in the our Galaxy. These objects are the metal-poor stars in the halo of the Milky Way. Recent work on nucleochronology finds that the…
Nine presently known "young" Galactic globular clusters, which have ages / 3 Gyr smaller than the oldest clusters of similar metallicity, all have RGC > 15 kpc. Furthermore these young globulars are found to have below-average luminosities.…
The Hubble constant, which measures the expansion rate, together with the total energy density of the Universe, sets the size of the observable Universe, its age, and its radius of curvature. Excellent progress has been made recently toward…
The age of the universe in the Big Bang model can be calculated from three parameters: Hubble's constant, h; the mass density of the universe, Omega_m; and the cosmological constant, Omega_lambda. Recent observations of the cosmic microwave…
We review five independent techniques which are used to set the distance scale to globular clusters, including subdwarf main sequence fitting utilizing the recent Hipparcos parallax catalogue. These data together all indicate that globular…
We present accurate relative ages for a sample of 55 Galactic globular clusters. The ages have been obtained by measuring the difference between the horizontal branch and the turnoff in two, internally photometrically homogeneous databases.…
In a recent striking discovery, Dunlop {\bf \it et al} observed a galaxy at redshift z=1.55 with an estimated age of 3.5 Gyr. This is incompatible with age estimates for a flat matter dominated universe unless the Hubble constant is less…
The ages of the oldest stellar objects in our galaxy provide an independent test of the current cosmological model as they give a lower limit to the age of the Universe. Recent accurate parallaxes by the Gaia space mission, accurate…
We determine the age of 1,104 early-type galaxies in eight rich clusters ($z = 0.0046$ to $0.175$) using a new continuum color technique. We find that galaxies in clusters divide into two populations, an old population with a mean age…
For the past 15 years most astronomers have assumed that 95% of the Universe was in some mysterious form of cold dark matter. They also assumed that the cosmological constant, Omega_Lambda, was Einstein's biggest blunder and could be…
Globular clusters (GCs) are among the oldest and densest stellar systems in the Universe, yet how they form remains a mystery. Here we present a suite of cosmological simulations in which both dark-matter-free GCs and dark-matter-rich dwarf…
The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has made startling discoveries regarding the early universe. It has revealed galaxies as soon as 300 million years after the Big Bang, challenging current galaxy formation models. Additionally, it has…
The interpretation of galaxy number counts in terms of cosmological models is fraught with difficulty due to uncertainties in the overall galaxy population (mix of morphological types, luminosity functions etc.) and in the observations…
In order to answer this question, we combine ten independent astrophysical constraints in the space of the density parameters $\Omega_m$ of gravitating matter and $\Omega_{\Lambda}$ of vacuum energy. We find that $\Omega_m=0.31\pm 0.07$,…
Determining reliable ages for old stellar objects at different redshifts offers a powerful means to constrain cosmology without relying on a specific cosmological model: this is known as the cosmic clocks method. Globular clusters (GCs),…
The number of known globular clusters in the Galactic bulge has been increasing steadily thanks to different new surveys. The aim of this study is to provide a census of the newly revealed globular clusters in the Galactic bulge, and…
We present explicit expressions for the calculation of cosmological look back time, for zero cosmological constant and arbitrary density parameter $\Omega$, which, in the limit as redshift becomes infinite, give the age of the universe. The…
Using up-to-date stellar models and isochrones we determine the age of 25 galactic halo clusters. The clusters are distributed into four groups according to metallicity. We measure the absolute age of a reference cluster in each group, and…