Age of the universe.

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Chapter 20, Problem 53EAP

To determine

Age of the universe.

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Using our example from the previous unit, let's try to determine the Hubble time for this example universe. You were given that a good representative galaxy receded at a speed of 4000 km/s and was found to be 20 Mpc away. With that in mind, what would the age of that universe be in years (aka what is that universe's Hubble time)? Go ahead and take the number of kilometers per Mpc to be approximately 3.1*10^19 km/Mpc. While this problem may look scary at first, this is really just bringing you full circle to one of the unit conversion problems you encountered at the beginning of this course.

mathematician Archimedes, responding to a claim that the number of grains of sand was infinite, calculated that the number of grains of sand needed to fill the universe was on the order of 1063. Our understanding of the size of the universe has changed since then, and we now know that the observable universe alone is a sphere with a radius of 1026 m. Estimating the size of a grain of sand, A) Approximately how many grains of sand would fill the observable universe? B) How many times larger or smaller is this number than Archimedes' result?

Assume the observable Universe is charge neutral, and that it contains n nuclei (hydrogen plus helium nuclei, ignoring other elements). Take the helium mass fraction as 1/4. How many electrons are there in the observable Universe? Enter your answer in scientific notation with one decimal place. Values: n = 5*10^80