Photo of the Milky Way

Astronomy’s Stacy McGaugh discusses empirical data used to measure the expansion of the universe

Age of the universe? Team says 12.6 billion years

MediumStacy McGaugh, professor and chair of the Department of Astronomy at the College of Arts and Sciences, discussed the empirical data—in this case observable measurements on the distance from Earth of 50 galaxies—to tweak a 90-year-old computational tool called the Hubble constant to measure the expansion of the universe.