Results from the European Space Agency’s Planck mission have revealed that the Universe is approximately 13.82 billion years old, 80 million years older than previously thought. The Planck mission centres on a space telescope which observes microwaves and radio waves from all over the Universe.
The light from furthest away was first emitted when the universe was only 380,000 years old, 0.003% of its current age. By tracing it back, the light reveals a more detailed picture of a universe only a trillionth of a trillionth of a second old, the tiny ‘quantum fluctuations’ of which have now stretched to become the largest structures in the universe, hundreds of millions of light years across.