One of the competing to the concept of Big Bang is the idea of the stationary Universe. In this case the Universe should be much older than the limitations of the Big Bang concept because the red shift of the stars will not be limited to the values of 20-100 (the primodial stars formed after half a billions years after Big Bang) but have no limitations at all (may be as big as it is possible to imagine). In this case the numerous limitations connected with galaxies formations are completely removed (presently to explain why they are formed so quickly the second concept of dark matter is introduced, that dark matter was clumping before the barionic matter and those clumps accelerated the formation of galaxies as we see them). Galaxies have more than enough time to form from the gas and no necessity in dark matter for the history of galaxies (dark matter hypothesis still would be necessary to explain the accelerated rotation of galaxies, but this is a different story, the dark matter is not necessary there too but for a different reason). But how old would be the Universe in this model? Assuming the red shift is due to some undiscovered yet mechanism of energy loss of the light during long long travel through the space ("tired light" but on new physical principles, see the previous post, for example) what would be the way to evaluate the age?
The only remaining light coming from all directions is the microwave background (with red shift of 1089, [1]). In this model there may be two explanation of it:
A.This is thermalized light and it has essentially the temperature of Universe. In this case there is no way to evaluate the age of Universe at all - it may be eternal in all senses (infinite age). The light from the far far stars is losing energy till the photon reached the thermal limit (kT of microwave background) at which moment it is not losing energy any more, but rather stay at this temperature (like very hot teapot can not cool below room temperature by no means, initially at water boiling temperature it will only asymptotically approach the room temperature but never below).
B.That light indeed reflects the first stars. In this case the age of Universe very approximately would be something like 0.5 - 1 trillion years (the stars with age of 14 billions years assumed to have red shift of 20-100, and microwave background has a red shift of 1089, so those stars should be 1089/20 ~ 50 times older. Because it is already known that the modern red shift is not larger than for younger ages (the concept of dark energy or accelerating expansion of Universe) it is necessary to assume that the lower the energy of photon the less eager it is losing the energy and makes the age even larger.
In short, the Universe is at least 0.5-1 trillion years old but most probably eternal in all senses of that word. However, even age of 500 - 1000 billions of years is much older compare to the present Big Bang age evaluation of 14 billions of years and allows all the possible and future discovered processes being completed without any additional hypothesis (no dark matter is necessary to form galaxies, no dark energy is necessary to explain the accelerated expansion etc).
References.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redshift
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