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Session 85 - Cosmology: Observations.
Display session, Friday, January 09
Exhibit Hall,
Two independent methods for estimating the age of the universe can both be linked to the absolute magnitudes of the RR Lyrae stars, one based on stellar evolution in globular clusters and the other based on the Hubble Constant derived from globular clusters as distance indicators. The latter has recently been extracted from HST-WFPC2 data for globular clusters in the Coma Cluster galaxy IC 4051 (Baum et al. 1997, AJ, 113, 1483). If RR Lyrae stars are brighter than we have previously thought, the stellar-evolution age estimate is shortened whereas the Hubble age is increased, so we can ask a very simple question: For what RR Lyrae magnitude zero point would the stellar-evolution age coincide with the Hubble age, and is it a reasonable value? Allowing 1 Gyr for globular clusters to have formed, and assuming a classical Einstein-deSitter universe with \Lambda = 0, I find the two ages to coincide if M_V(RR) \approx 0.16[Fe/H] + 0.46, which (among other things) puts the Large Magellanic Cloud at (m-M) = 18.78 \pm 0.17 mag. The implied age of the universe is 11.0 \pm 1.4 Gyr, and the corresponding H_0 = 59 \pm 8 km/s per Mpc.
