NASA launched a space probe in June, 2001 to gather precise measurements of cosmic microwave background radiation, the technical term for the light left over from the Big Bang.  A sharp image was compiled recently from data sent back for over a year and from a million miles away.

Because of the time it takes light to travel, the new data showed the universe almost immediately after the Big Bang, the furthest back astronomers have ever been able to see.  It shows clumps of matter just beginning to cool and congeal from the initial fireball of what would eventually become all the galaxies in the universe, including our own Milky Way. 

From that picture, astrophysicists were able to calculate the age of the universe with unprecedented precision.  Earlier estimates had ranged from 8 billion to 20 billion years, but in recent years they narrowed to somewhere between 12 billion and 15 billion years.  The newly calculated estimate of 13.7 billion years has a margin of error of only 1 percent. (see ref.)

Charles Bennett of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, who led the project, reported:

         We've now laid the cornerstone of a unified cosmic theory,
         by having a new set of very accurate numbers that describe
         a wide range of cosmic measurements.

The universe had a beginning.  We knew that.  We now know it's birth date.