By examining the feeble, burned-out husks of the oldest stars in our galaxy with the Hubble Space Telescope, astronomers have shown that the universe is at least 14 billion years old.

Scientists described Wednesday’s news “like suddenly opening a drawer and finding your birth certificate,” said Bruce Margon, an associate director of the Space Telescope Science Institute, the organization that operates Hubble.

Pushing the limits of its powerful vision, NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has uncovered the oldest burned-out stars, ancient white dwarf stars in our Milky Way Galaxy, that turned out to be about 13 billion years old.

The new birthday lies within the best estimated range of the age of the universe to date: 13 billion to 14 billion years.

The independent confirmation suggests that after decades of sometimes frustrating work, astronomers using different methods are finally nearing the correct answer. Such unanimity on a basic fact is crucial in answering more sophisticated questions about how the universe behaves.

“It makes everybody feel happier that we each individually know what we are talking about,” said Brad Hansen, a postdoctoral astronomy researcher at the University of California, Los Angeles who helped create the new measurement with Harvey Richer, an astronomer at the University of British Columbia.

Although it is such a basic measurement and fundamental to understanding how the universe was created and then evolved, determining the age of the universe has proven excruciatingly difficult.

Until a few years ago, estimates of the age ranged from 20 billion years to 8 billion an age that suggested the unsettling notion that the universe was younger than the stars within it.

The new measurement was made by looking at the charred remnants of white dwarfs, massive stars that burned out long ago. Because these stars cool at a constant rate, they are sometimes called “clockwork stars.” Scientists can estimate the age of the universe by measuring the color and brightness of the remains of these white dwarfs and then calculating how long it had taken for the star to cool to their current state.

Modeling work by Hansen showed that the old dead stars were not merely “black bodies” but gave off visible light because of the complexities of their atmospheres.

Given this information, Richer and his team decided to use the Hubble telescope to find the ancient star remnants. Because they were so faint, detecting them required an exposure of eight days.

The stars studied were in the densely packed globular star cluster M4, which lies just 7,000 light years away from Earth.

The stars that were studied were thought to have formed about 1 billion years after the Big Bang, according to leading theories.

That means if the stars are approximately 13 billion years old, then the universe is at least 14 billion years old.