The universe could well be nearly twice as old as the widely accepted 13.797 billion years. That extraordinary contention in a recent paper by University of Ottawa Professor Rajendra Gupta has the potential to upend much of what one has come to accept about the age of the universe.

Prof Gupta’s paper revives a nearly 100-year-old tired light theory and lets it coexist with the expanding universe to arrive at its real age of 26.7 billion years. In a sense, he reinterprets the redshift, or the light stretched by the expanding universe into the red end of the electromagnetic spectrum, as a hybrid phenomenon, rather than purely due to expansion. He spoke to Mayank Chhaya Reports to explain the physics of the age of the universe.