Discover Dialogue: Wendy Freedman

For decades, some cosmological studies indicated that the universe is younger than the oldest stars, an obvious impossibility. Wendy Freedman at the Carnegie Observatories in Pasadena, California, recently used the Hubble Space Telescope to determine how quickly the universe is expanding, then ran the picture backward to figure out when it all began. Her international team estimates the cosmos is 12 billion years old--almost exactly the age of the most ancient stars.