Tuesday, June 7, 2016

Expanding Expansion

Summary: Based on new data from the Hubble Space Telescope, the universe might actually be expanding faster than previously thought. This new data comes from an updated study of the velocities of Cepheid Variable Stars and Type Ia Supernovae to determine a value for the Hubble constant. The new data points to a slightly higher value of 73.24 km/sec/Mpc. This is only slightly higher than the value of 70 used in many textbooks.

However, this only increases the gap between the value gained from this method and the value gained from the Planck telescope. Those experiments lead to a Hubble value of 66.53 km/sec/Mpc. This means the difference of a few hundred million years when calculating the age of the universe.

At this point, astronomers can only guess at the cause of the discrepancy. Many point fingers at Dark Energy or a fourth flavor of Neutrino, but ultimately we hope that the next generation of telescopes can show us the answers.

Source:
BBC News
arXiv

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