The universe may be a billion years younger than we thought

Recent studies show they may have overestimated the age of the universe by more than a billion years — a surprising realization that is forcing them to rethink key parts of the scientific story of how we got from the Big Bang to today. An expanding universe implies that the universe has a definite age, because you can retrace the action back to a time when everything in the cosmos was crammed together in an extremely dense, hot state: what we call the Big Bang. The difficulty of making direct observations of other galaxies is one of the reasons why scientists created the Planck space telescope.

Source: www.nbcnews.com