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I've read an analogy that finding iron-rich galaxies just 900 years after the Big Bang is like finding an old man in a crib in a nursery. We just recently found a supermassive black hole 12 billion solar masses at Z > 6. Our current understanding is that a Black Hole this size would take billions of years to form, yet there it is just 900 million years old. There is also the Methuselah star in our own galaxy that is on the very edge of the margin of error. What other evidence is there that the universe might be older than the currently popular age of 13.8 billion years?

Qmechanic
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    Did you mean 12 billion solar masses? – John Rennie Feb 27 '15 at 16:29
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    This doesn't count as "evidence" but it's interesting to note that the 13.8 was calculated for a flat universe. Increasing the curvature to a slightly closed universe and adjusting the other values of matter and dark energy densities to balance the total back to 1 (as it needs to be) gives ages for the universe that are between 13 and 16 billion years, but in all cases, the age of the universe calculated is always around $1/H_0$ (which is the factor in front of that integral coincidentally). Point is, if the universe is slightly closed, you get the age as older – Jim Feb 27 '15 at 16:40
  • @Jimdalf, I have a tough time with lambda-CDM. As a general rule, if you throw six variables at an equation, you can describe just about anything by tuning them. lambda-CDM hasn't predicted a single thing, it is simply the result of making a formula with six degrees of freedom match the data. –  Feb 27 '15 at 16:54
  • Related: https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/11136/2451 and links therein. – Qmechanic Feb 27 '15 at 16:54
  • Your question seems to be asking for some kind of a list, which is a format that typically doesn't do too well on this site. – Danu Feb 27 '15 at 16:57
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    @DRAirey1 well I disagree with that part about $\Lambda CDM$. It's predicted lot's of things. And there's not much tuning you can do, it's just that slightly closed is not usually a considered option for reasons that were nullified some years ago. The data fits flat, but it also fits slightly closed and the age increases but not by much. Either way, $\Lambda CDM$ is a good model – Jim Feb 27 '15 at 17:10
  • And if this black hole turns out to be three or four billion years old, then what does that tell you about ΛCDM? There's already serious tension between VMAP data and SNe Ia data, so there's really not any more room to play with the ratios. There's plenty of evidence for ΛCDM. What evidence to we have against it? –  Feb 27 '15 at 17:17
  • think this is a halfway decent question & not really a so-called se "list question" (whatever that is). there is some misunderstanding here. the current interpretation of the new found massive black hole is that the current model of black hole formation is up for question/ reevaluation, not the current estimated age of the universe. so far havent heard any mainstream physicists asserting the age of the universe has to be reevaluated although that is one alternative.... – vzn Feb 27 '15 at 17:29
  • "Our current understanding"? Whose current understanding is this? There are plenty of ideas to explain how a 10 billion solar mass black hole can grow in 1 billion years. It either requires a very large seed mass or super-Eddington accretion. Both of which are possible. – ProfRob Feb 27 '15 at 18:23
  • @Jimdalf the Grey - I'm not trying to be argumentative here or snide. I truly would like to see some ΛCDM predictions that came true. Do you have any links you could share? –  Feb 27 '15 at 18:35
  • @DRAirey1 well, the $\Lambda CDM$ prediction for the power spectrum of the CMB anisotropies is practically a perfect match to the observations. To see this, just search "lambda-cdm power spectrum" in google and almost all of the hits are a good reference. It's such a good fit that the lines corresponding to observations is virtually indistinguishable from that for predictions on a graph. I'd say that's a successful prediction – Jim Feb 27 '15 at 20:15
  • @Jimdalf - That word, predict, I don't think it means what you think it means. ΛCDM is a formula with six degrees of freedom. We used the data from the power curve to tune those parameters. The reason there's such a good match is because we used the WMAP data to calculate the ratios. This is not prediction, this is matching the theory to the collected data. Now if you wanted to try a prediction, you could try these parameters out on some totally different aspect of nature, say SNe Ia magnitudes. –  Feb 27 '15 at 22:41
  • @DRAirey1 If it is so easy to describe all of cosmology with six free parameters, then I would very much like you (or anyone else) to come up with another theory with only 6 free parameters that would describe all of cosmology equally well. – Ihle Feb 28 '15 at 10:12
  • @Ihle $$ x = \phi t^2 $$The total amount of space in any one dimension is proportional to the square of the time. Two parameters describe the metrics of space better than ΛCDM: the age of the universe and the proportion, phi, which is 2e-14 km/s^2. Occam's Razor is satisfied with just two parameters. –  Feb 28 '15 at 15:42
  • @DRAirey1 I'll give you that your definition of "predict" and that commonly used by physicists is probably different. But the power spectrum counts as a prediction. However, these comments are getting too off-topic. – Jim Mar 02 '15 at 14:51

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