The Age of the Universe from Joint Analysis of Cosmological Probes

Analyses of various cosmological probes, including the latest Cosmic Microwave Background anisotropies, the 2dF Galaxy Redshift Survey and Cepheid-calibrated distance indicators suggest that the age of expansion is $13 \pm 3$ Gyr. We discuss some statistical aspects of this estimation, and we also present results for joint analysis of the latest CMB and Cepheid data by utilizing `Hyper-Parameters'. The deduced age of expansion might be uncomfortably close to the age of the oldest Globular Clusters, in particular if they formed relatively recently.