Yousuf Khan wrote:
Jim Black wrote:

Okay great, then assuming by some discovery we find out how much of the
universe is outside of our viewing range, will that affect the
calculations for the age of the universe?

Not for our part of the universe. The portion of the universe outside
the region from which light has or could have travelled to us cannot
have had an effect on the part of the universe we can, in principle,
observe. To do so, some sort of information about the outside region
would have to have travelled faster than the speed of light to
influence us.


So if the age of the universe is always based on only what we can see,
wouldn't that mean that the age of the universe will always be fixed at
the current age (of whatever estimate you want to use)? If the estimate
says the age of the universe is 13.7 billion years old now, then the
universe will forever be 13.7 billion years old, even if we do the
calculation a 100 billion years or a trillion years from now.

Yousuf Khan


There is more than one way to estimate the age of the universe.

Ref: http://www.astro.ucla.edu/~wright/cosmolog.htm#News

New Age for the Universe

30 Jun 2005 - This week's Nature has a letter giving a new determination
of the age of the Universe based on the age of the isotopes. 238U and
232Th are both radioactive with half-lives of 4.468 and 14.05 Gyrs but
the uranium is underabundant in the Solar System compared to the expected
production ratio in supernovae. This is not surprising since the 238U has
a shorter half-life, and the magnitude of the difference gives an estimate
for the age of the Universe. But the production ratio is poorly known from
nuclear physics models, so Dauphas (2005, Nature, 435, 1203) combines the
Solar System 238U:232Th ratio with the ratio observed in very old, metal
poor stars to solve simultaneous equations for both the production ratio
and the age of the Universe, obtaining 14.5 +2.8/-2.2 Gyr.

See: http://www.astro.ucla.edu/~wright/cosmolog.htm#News