The beauty of the human mind and intelligence is that we keep on wondering about things that we do not understand and are beyond our available knowledge base until we get the right answer. One such question that has been bothering us ever since our existence is that how old is the universe we live in.
We know as a fact that this universe is billions of year old but of course we need an exact number to feed our curiosity. Now it has been revealed by European Space Agency that according to their findings using the Planck space probe this universe is 80 million years older than we originally thought and in reality it is 13.8 billion years old.
The Planck space probe is a way to scan the cosmic microwave background radiation which is constantly spreading through out the sky. This is essentially the leftover heat originating from the moments this universe came into existence. Now after examining this data scientists believe that our universe is 80 million years more older than we thought before. In their research scientists also mentioned a new theory called the inflation. The inflation theory states that the universe exploded in subatomic to the massive size in just a fraction of second, which is remarkable.
So the whole universe was the size of an atom, which exploded into a massive size. The speed of its growth was much faster than the speed of light.
The telescope used in this study was the Planck space telescope which was built back in 2009 and costed $900 million. The sole purpose of this telescope is to map out the sky and study how this universe came into existence. It has been active since 15 months and will become dysfunctional when it runs out of cooling fuel later this year.