NASA’s Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) team has published a study based on the last seven years of observations from the WMAP satellite. The results define several constants in greater detail, including: the age of the Universe (13.75 billion years +/- 110 million), the Hubble constant (70.4 +/- 1.4 km/s per megaparsec), the degree to which the Universe’s geometry is flat (1.0023 +/- 0.0055), confirmation of some signs of early inflationary episodes, confirmation of the action of dark energy as Einstein’s cosmological constant, the date of the first quasars (460 +/- 80 million years, for a red shift of 10.4 +/- 1.2), and the first observation of primordial helium, further confirming the Big Bang model.
