Not definitively. The problem is that it hasn't yet been unambiguously established which of several Big Bang models apply to the observations we have about the expansion rate of the universe and its total mass. Until this gets resolved, the estimates for the current age of the universe range anywhere from 9 billion years to 20 billion years.
Stellar astronomers seem to be convinced that the ages for some globular cluster stars are as young as 7 billion years, or for some other globular clusters may be as old as 14 or 15 billion years. The oldest of these clusters would seem to be in contradiction with the ages of the universe that are in the 7 - 12 billion year range. These include models with expansion rates of 100 kilometers per second per megaparsec, with a density of 0.1 of the critical density. Hubble Space Telescope observations of Cepheid stars in nearby galaxies seem to place the expansion rate near 75 km/sec/megaparsec but using supernova as distance calibrators you get expansion rates near 55 km/sec/megaparsec.
Also, astronomers have discovered an unseen mass component 'dark matter' which could make the density as high as perhaps 0.4 or even 1.0. The best estimates from several independent studies suggest a dark matter plus luminous matter component of about Omega = 0.3 and a cosmological constant of 0.70. The detection of a cosmological constant effect in 1998 has definitely helped, because now the ages of the oldest stars are comfortably younger than the age of an open universe undergoing accelerated expansion.
All these observations are in a state of flux, and we hope that in the next 10 years these matters will be settled.
It is simply too soon to tell, yet.
Copyright 1997 Dr. Sten Odenwald
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