A supercomputer in downtown Oakland has identified the most ancient light in the universe, assembling an image that reveals that the universe is older, and slower, than we thought. The powerful Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory computer, housed in a former Wells Fargo Bank vault near the Paramount Theatre, analyzed data sent by NASA from Europe's Planck space telescope. It compiled a portrait of an infant cosmos that was hot, small and crowded -- and traced our creation back 13.8 billion years, about 100 million years older than previous estimates. Its analysis also revealed a rate of expansion that is slower than seen from other space telescopes, forcing some theoretical rethinking.
"This is the baby picture of our universe," said physicist Julian Borrill of the Laboratory's Computational Cosmology Center, who worked on the analysis, which was announced at a news conference Thursday in Paris. "It's as far back as we can look," he said...
UC manages the Lab. Who knows what remains to be discovered?
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