In physical cosmology, the age of the universe is the time elapsed since the Big Bang. The current measurement of the age of the universe is billion years ( years) within the Lambda-CDM concordance model. The uncertainty of 21 million years has been obtained by the agreement of a number of scientific research projects, such as microwave background radiation measurements by the Planck satellite, the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe and other probes. Measurements of the cosmic background radiation give the cooling time of the universe since the Big Bang, and measurements of the expansion rate of the universe can be used to calculate its approximate age by extrapolating backwards in time.