WASHINGTON (Feb. 11) - Scientists using a robotic NASA probe have determined with precision the age of the universe -- 13.7 billion years -- and figured out when stars began to shine.

Astronomers have been closing in on these numbers for decades, but a spacecraft now about a million miles from Earth was able to look back to nearly the dawn of time to find the answers, NASA researchers said on Tuesday.

Stars started shining just 200 million years after the theoretical Big Bang, scientists said in announcing findings of the so-called WMAP mission, which gazed on the universe when there were no stars, no galaxies, nothing except minute differences in temperature.

These temperature differences were as little as one-millionth of a degree, but that was enough to create vast hot and cold spots that signaled the beginning of the clumping that eventually became every known structure in the universe, the scientists said.

WMAP -- short for Wilkinson Microwave Anisotopy Probe -- looked back in time to just 380,000 years after the Big Bang explosion that many astronomers believe gave birth to the universe. That is further back in time than even the orbiting Hubble Space Telescope can see.
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I remember scientists claiming the exact age of the universe was 10 billion years a few years ago, so now they're all suddenly 100% it's exactly 13 billions years old? In a decade they'll probably nag about how the universe is 16 billion years old.lol what a laugh