Since American astronomer Edwin Hubble came up with this equation in the 1920s, scientists have been bickering over the universe's exact age. They've narrowed it down to between 10 and 20 billion years.
That's not good enough for UNLV physics Professor George Rhee. Since the oldest stars have been pegged at 13 billion years old, he can't imagine the universe forming 10 billion years ago.
He thinks the universe is more like 15 or 16 billion years old. He plans to prove his theory using the Hubble telescope.
The V in the equation stands for velocity. Scientists already know how to measure the speed of stars. The standard method of coming up with the H, or the Hubble Constant (the rate at which the universe is expanding), has been to concentrate on nearby galaxies and take several measurements of them. But this leaves room for error, Rhee believes.
He plans to use the Hubble telescope to take about 80 images of a double quasar galaxy several light years away. By measuring this double quasar, Rhee figures he can calculate a more accurate Hubble Constant, and thus come up with a truer distance.
Once distance is determined, Rhee then can use the equation to pinpoint the timing of the Big Bang - the explosion scientists theorize formed the universe.
"We wrote a program telling the Hubble what to do," Rhee said. "We should get 18 hours of use toward the end of this month or the beginning of November. Getting time on the Hubble is very competitive. In this sense, it shows scientist who compete nationally that we (at UNLV) can get time to use the best equipment, too."
Rhee is collaborating with Tony Tyson of Bell Laboratories in New Jersey and Gary Berstein and Phil Fischer of the University of Michigan. They paln to publish their results this spring in Nature or the Astrophysical Journal, two prestigious science magazines.
Rhee, 34, has been at UNLV for two years. Before that, the Geneva, Switzerland, native was a professor at New Mexico State.
He wrote his Hubble proposal a year ago and got the green light in January. He previously photographed the double quasar from Nount Mauna Kea, an inactive volcano in Hawaii, using an optical telescope with a 12 - foot mirror. The Hubble will enable him to concentrate on the shapes of fainter objects around the quasar.
A quasar is a galaxy with something shiny in its center, Rhee said. This one appears to have a double balck dot in the center because light emitting from it is being bent by gravity in a large galaxy between earth and the quasar.
Galaxies are continually moving away from us, Rhee said. Hubble enables scientists to get sharper images of these galaxies because it is positioned several hundred miles above the Earth's surface, clear of atmospheric distortions.
"we will measure these shapes, and from these we will be able to map the mass that's bending the light," he said. "From this map, we will then be able to measure the age of the universe. We might see something surprising. You never know what you will see."
Eventually, Rhee and his associates would like to build a dedicated telescope with a 4-meter mirror to map a larger area of the sky. For this, they figure they'll need $10 million.