We used to think that the universe is 16-20 billion years old. It was written like that in encyclopedias and everything. Now scientists think that it is 8-12 billion years old while the oldest stars are at least 14 billion years old.
Wendy freedman, of Canegie Observatories in Pasendena California, and her collaeges were the first to discover this. They had sent the Hubble Telescope, with the repaires lens, to find the ages of some of the stars in the Coma Cluster. The Coma Cluster was too far away to do it in one shot so they would first send it to some Ceoheids in the Virgo Cluster. They found it to be 56 million light years away.
By dividing the clusters recession speed (all clusters are moving away to some point between Hydra and Centeraus) by the distance, it gives you the Hubble Constant, in km per second. It was at 80, plus or minus 17. If it had been expanding at this same rate all the time the universe is quite young, 8-12 billion years old, from the Big Bang!
The stars move toward the Cosmic Microwave Background (cmb). Half of the cmb is pulling and the other half is pushing. The other galaxy clusters are headed toward somewhere beyond Orion. “We observed lots of galaxies more than once from different locations, to check ourselves” says Marc Postman.
“What we found,” says Tod Lauer, “Was that the Earth is indeed moving with respect to these distant galaxies. But it’s moving in a different direction with respect to the cmb -- the two are off by about 75 degrees.”
Earth can’t be streaking through space in two entirely different directions at once. The only solution Lauer and Postman came up with is that some vast cosmic current, far larger than the one caused by the hypothetical Great Attraction, is sweeping across the galaxies, including the Milkyway, at 435 miles per second!