No "Age of the Universe" Controversy - Per Dr. Allan Sandage 
by Dean Fletcher

Among the untold numbers of amateur astronomers over the country, there may be
tens of thousands who have experienced frustration hundreds of times over the
years with gunky, and/or light-polluted skies.

In such frustration, I've found a measure of sour grapes comfort in reflecting
that, oh well, even after a long drive from the city on the one or two moonless
Saturday evenings a month that amateur observing is possible, and even if the
viewing is very good, we might see somewhat clearly, for the most part, only many
objects that are in our particular spiral arm of our Milky Way Galaxy.

To range beyond our immediate neighborhood of stars and sky objects, generally
requires the services and education and the output from the professional
astronomers with their access to multi-million dollar equipment at, for example,
Cerro Tololo in the Andes, Mauna Kea in Hawaii, or use of the Hubble Space
Telescope.

Along with the professionals, we amateurs also can ponder the outer reaches of
cosmology, the beginning and ending of our particular universe, what the true
measure of the Hubble Constant might be, where all the dark matter is that
mathematics, gravitation and physics say is there but which we haven't yet
discovered and identified.  Probably most tantalizing of all for many
cosmological philosophers, - is Omega one, or less than or more than one?  The
exact answer to this, of course, will let us know if our universe is to expand
forever, peter out in its expanding, or cause everything to come back together in
a Big Crunch.  (And if Bertrand Russell were still alive, he might suggest that a
version of God he wrote about would then say, "That was an enjoyable play, - I'll
have to see it again sometime.")

Personally, I've enjoyed following the career of Dr. Allan Sandage, perhaps to
some extent because he and I were born eleven days apart in the same month of the
same year.  (Incidentally, another type of star was also born this same month of
the same year, - a person by the name of Norma Jean Mortenson - who later became
known to the world as Marilyn Monroe).

Dr. Sandage, after his education,  worked directly with Edwin Hubble for some
years and according to the Encyclopedia Brittannica was the optical discoverer
among other things of those intriguing and still-not-understood phenomena called
quasers.

For the last several years Dr. Sandage has headed a team of astronomers at
Carnegie Observatories which has been trying more accurately to quantify the
Hubble Constant.  He has been kind enough to send me copies of some of the talks
he has given around the world which summarizes his team's findings.

Basically the problem (and controversy) has been that at least one other
astronomical team,  namely, that of Dr. Wendy Freedman, also of Carnegie
Observatories in Pasedena, has looked at,  say, Messier object 100 (well beyond
parallax triangulation), and determined a very high Hubble Constant which, when
working backward, yields a Universe from 8 to 12 billion years of age.  Many
astronomers maintain that they have calibrated many stars' ages as being over 15
billion years (gee, who is right, - or can we really have stars older than the
Universe which created them?).   Dr. Sandage's team in their own calculations of
the distance to the M-100 galaxy in Virgo, calculate a significantly lower Hubble
Constant, which then gives an age of the Universe as closer to  20 billion years,
which, of course, makes more sense unless a person has taken to heart too many
"Back to the Future" movies.

In a lecture at a Johns Hopkins workshop in Baltimore in 1995, Dr. Sandage
recapped some nine independent methods which argue for a correct value of the
Hubble (Universe Expansion) Constant as averaging about 50, - thus yielding an
age of the Universe to be approximately 19 1/2 billion years of age.

Briefly, several of these nine methods embraced determining the distance to the
heart of our own Virgo supercluster of galaxies (of which the Milky Way and
Andromeda galaxies in our "Local Group" are a small but significant part),
determining the diameters of Andromeda Galaxy and M-101 "look-alikes" combined
with Hubble Telescope diagrams of these look-alikes, and measurement of
Tully-Fisher field and cluster galaxies as well as supernovae types B and V.

To say the least, each of these individual measurements is fraught with its own
difficulties which have to be adjusted.  For example, to measure to the core of
the Virgo supercluster requires that the peculiar motion of Virgo be ascertained
so that the true distance between us and Virgo can be calibrated with more
precision.  In Sandage's words which summarize more accurately than mine,
"Because of the non-uniform distribution of mass in the Virgo complex, the mean
redshift of Virgo relative to us is affected by peculiar motions induced upon the
cosmic expansion by the Virgo density anomaly",  (as "our expansion from the
Virgo core is retarded by the Virgo pull").

Although Dr. Sandage and his group give the Freedman group credit for their work
as far as it goes, Sandage's group suggest that Freedman's group has come to an
incorrect conclusion giving them a larger Hubble Constant by using a single
distance to M100, and that they cannot demonstrate where M100 is in the Virgo
complex relative to the Virgo core.  Although he is too polite to say so, it
would suggest that perhaps the Freedman group "should go back to the drawing
board". Dr. Sandage's conclusion is that "there is no crisis in cosmology
regarding the time scale as determined from (1) the expansion rate at the present
epoch,  and  (2) the independently known age of the universe determined from
stellar expansion...Ó