To settle the score, an international team of astronomers led by Cornell university used data from the National Science Foundation's Atacama Cosmology Telescope (ACT) in Chile and "cosmic geometry" to end the debate, Cornell officials said in a statement. Their estimate of (about) 13.77 billion years roughly matches the estimate from the Planck Collaboration.

"Now we've come up with an answer where Planck and ACT agree," astronomer Simone Aiola, a researcher at the Flatiron Institute's Center for Computational Astrophysics in New York City and author of one of two new papers describing these findings, said in the same statement. "It speaks to the fact that these difficult measurements are reliable."

By determining the age of the universe, the researchers also were able to estimate how fast the universe is expanding — this figure is known as the Hubble constant. With ACT, they calculated a Hubble constant of 42 miles per second per megaparsec, or 67.6 kilometers per second per megaparsec. In other (simpler) words, they found that an object 1 megaparsec (or about 3.26 million light-years) away from Earth would be moving away from Earth at 42 miles per second (67.6 km/s).