Knowledge regarding the age of the oldest stars supports the new finding.

"The reason why we might think this estimate is true and not just a myth is because when we look at...systems of stars, we can estimate the age of the oldest stars, and those seem to come in at around 11 to 15 billion years old," Kirshner said.

The Hubble telescope, which was used to measure the intensity of Cepheids in 18 different galaxies, can accurately see stars which are distant and dim.

"It makes sharper images," Kirshner said. "We're going to open a store called 'The Sharper Image' which sells Hubble telescopes," he joked.

While undergraduates know Kirshner as the professor of the popular Core class Science A-35, "Matter in The Universe," Kirshner moonlights as a member of the High-Z Supernova team, a group of researchers who looks at supernovae.

"We looked at very distant supernovae, and that's where we saw evidence for the acceleration of the universe," Kirshner said.

The Hubble constant and the acceleration of the universe are both necessary to estimate the age of the universe, Kirshner said.

Another group working at the Lawrence Berkeley Lab found separately but simultaneously that the universe has been speeding up.

Meanwhile, on Wednesday, Dr. Charles Lineweaver, an astrophysicist at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia, published an independent estimate of the universe's age in the journal Science. Lineweaver assessed the universe at 13.4 billion years old with a margin of error of 1.6 billion years.

Given their overlapping margins of error, the two estimates are essentially in accordance. Lineweaver reached his conclusion working with the published results of many other investigators, unlike the independent research of the HST Key Project Team