spatially closed, loitering universe


Below is a plot of the time evolution of the cosmic scale factor. The filled dot represents where we are on this plot at the present time. This universe spent a long time "loitering" around a redshift of 1.25.


The age of the universe for a given value of and depends on the value of that we measure observationally. Below is a plot of the age of the universe vs. . ( is believed to be 7010 km/s/Mpc, but its value is widely debated.)


These values of and lead to an extremely old universe. Note the change in scale of the vertical axis compared to the other universes' age plots. This is due to the long time spent loitering at a nearly constant scale factor.