Posted on 01/20/2025 6:10:09 AM PST by Red Badger
The Hubble tension grows: new data shows the Universe’s expansion defies current physics models, suggesting our understanding of cosmology may need a major overhaul. Credit: SciTechDaily.com
New research confirms the Universe is expanding faster than theoretical models predict, intensifying the Hubble tension.
Using precise measurements of the Coma cluster, scientists recalibrated the cosmic distance ladder, suggesting flaws in existing cosmological models.
Expanding Universe: A Startling Discovery
The Universe appears to be expanding faster than expected — faster than theoretical models predict and beyond what our current understanding of physics can explain.
New measurements have confirmed earlier, highly debated results showing this unexpected rate of expansion. The gap between these findings and established models is known as the Hubble tension. Now, research published in Astrophysical Journal Letters offers even stronger evidence that the Universe is growing at a faster pace.
“The tension now turns into a crisis,” said Dan Scolnic, who led the research team.
Intensifying Cosmic Dilemma
Since Edwin Hubble’s 1929 discovery that the Universe is expanding, determining the precise rate of this expansion — called the Hubble constant — has been a cornerstone of cosmological research.
Scolnic, an associate professor of Physics at Duke University, explains it as trying to build the Universe’s growth chart: we know what size it had at the Big Bang, but how did it get to the size it is now? In his analogy, the Universe’s baby picture represents the distant Universe, the primordial seeds of galaxies. The Universe’s current headshot represents the local Universe, which contains the Milky Way and its neighbors. The standard model of cosmology is the growth curve connecting the two. The problem is: things don’t connect.
Universe’s Expansion Rate Widens With New Hubble Data
This illustration shows the three basic steps astronomers use to calculate how fast the universe expands over time, a value called the Hubble constant. All the steps involve building a strong “cosmic distance ladder,” by starting with measuring accurate distances to nearby galaxies and then moving to galaxies farther and farther away. This “ladder” is a series of measurements of different kinds of astronomical objects with an intrinsic brightness that researchers can use to calculate distances. Credit: NASA, ESA and A. Feild (STScI)
The Broken Model of Cosmology
“This is saying, to some respect, that our model of cosmology might be broken,” said Scolnic.
Measuring the Universe requires a cosmic ladder, which is a succession of methods used to measure the distances to celestial objects, with each method, or “rung,” relying on the previous for calibration.
The ladder used by Scolnic was created by a separate team using data from the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI), which is observing more than 100,000 galaxies every night from its vantage point at the Kitt Peak National Observatory.
Scolnic recognized that this ladder could be anchored closer to Earth with a more precise distance to the Coma Cluster, one of the galaxy clusters nearest to us.
Coma Cluster Dark Energy Camera
Extremely precise measurements of the distance between the Earth and the Coma cluster of galaxies provide new evidence for the Universe’s faster-than-expected rate of expansion. Credit: CTIO/NOIRLab/DOE/NSF/AURA, Image Processing: D. de Martin & M. Zamani (NSF NOIRLab)
Precise Measurements Challenge Established Theories
“The DESI collaboration did the really hard part, their ladder was missing the first rung,” said Scolnic. “I knew how to get it, and I knew that that would give us one of the most precise measurements of the Hubble constant we could get, so when their paper came out, I dropped absolutely everything and worked on this non-stop.”
To get a precise distance to the Coma cluster, Scolnic and his collaborators, with funding from the Templeton foundation, used the light curves from 12 Type Ia supernovae within the cluster. Just like candles lighting a dark path, Type Ia supernovae have a predictable luminosity that correlates to their distance, making them reliable objects for distance calculations.
The team arrived at a distance of about 320 million light-years, nearly in the center of the range of distances reported across 40 years of previous studies — a reassuring sign of its accuracy.
“This measurement isn’t biased by how we think the Hubble tension story will end,” said Scolnic. “This cluster is in our backyard, it has been measured long before anyone knew how important it was going to be.”
Using this high-precision measurement as a first rung, the team calibrated the rest of the cosmic distance ladder. They arrived at a value for the Hubble constant of 76.5 kilometers per second per megaparsec, which essentially means that the local Universe is expanding 76.5 kilometers per second faster every 3.26 million light-years.
Bridge Diagram Showing Different Measurements of the Hubble Constant An artist’s impression showing the different measurements of the Hubble constant by different missions and methods. Special thanks to Adam Riess, who invented the original version of this illustratioon. Key: CMB (cosmic microwave background), WMAP (Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe), BAO (Baryonic Acoustic Oscillation), BB (Big Bang) nucleosynthesis, DES (Dark Energy Survey), Lambda CDM (Lambda Cold Dark Matter), TRGB (Tip of the red-giant branch). Credit: NOIRLab/NSF/AURA/J. da Silva
This value matches existing measurements of the expansion rate of the local Universe. However, like all of those measurements, it conflicts with measurements of the Hubble constant using predictions from the distant Universe. In other words: it matches the Universe’s expansion rate as other teams have recently measured it, but not as our current understanding of physics predicts it. The longstanding question is: is the flaw in the measurements or in the models?
Scolnic’s team’s new results adds tremendous support to the emerging picture that the root of the Hubble tension lies in the models.
“Over the last decade or so, there’s been a lot of re-analysis from the community to see if my team’s original results were correct,” said Scolnic, whose research has consistently challenged the Hubble constant predicted using the standard model of physics. “Ultimately, even though we’re swapping out so many of the pieces, we all still get a very similar number. So, for me, this is as good of a confirmation as it’s ever gotten.”
Challenging the Models of Cosmology
“We’re at a point where we’re pressing really hard against the models we’ve been using for two and a half decades, and we’re seeing that things aren’t matching up,” said Scolnic. “This may be reshaping how we think about the Universe, and it’s exciting! There are still surprises left in cosmology, and who knows what discoveries will come next?”
Reference:
“The Hubble Tension in Our Own Backyard: DESI and the Nearness of the Coma Cluster”
by Daniel Scolnic, Adam G. Riess, Yukei S. Murakami, Erik R. Peterson, Dillon Brout, Maria Acevedo, Bastien Carreres, David O. Jones, Khaled Said, Cullan Howlett and Gagandeep S. Anand, 15 January 2025, The Astrophysical Journal Letters.
DOI: 10.3847/2041-8213/ada0bd
Scolnic, D., Riess, A.G., Murakami, Y.S., Peterson, E.R., Brout, D., Acevedo, M., Carreres, B., Jones, D.O., Said, K., Howlett, C. and Anand, G.S., 2025. The Hubble Tension in our own Backyard: DESI and the Nearness of the Coma Cluster. The Astrophysical Journal Letters, 979, L9. DOI 10.3847/2041-8213/ada0bd
This work was conducted with funding from the Templeton Foundation, the Department of Energy, the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, the Sloan Foundation, the National Science Foundation and NASA.
I remember that at its peak, Hubble was changing what we knew about space so often that astrophysicists couldn’t write textbooks for fear that they would be outdated as soon as they were published.
And then there is the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), which is designed to observe the universe in infrared light, which showed that changing the bandwidth changed everything.
It’s a great big universe
And we’re all really puny
We’re just tiny little specks
About the size of Mickey Rooney
If the Universe is spherical, or even ‘football-shaped’ as some conjecture, then we should be able to ‘see’ both sides of an object like a galaxy, in opposite directions!............
All the more important to hold in cow farts and to stop exhaling.
“You’re expanding things!”
A quantum leap forward in time and space
The universe learned to expand
Mess and magic, triumphant and tragic
A mechanized world out of hand
Does this mean that we can expect the ocean-levels to radically drop, any day now?
How soon before our ICBMs will not be able to reach China, Russia, EU, or North Korea?
It is my understanding that to an outside observer, any object seen plunging into a black hole will be seen as ‘frozen in time’ as it moves closer to the Event Horizon. Time doesn’t actually ‘stop’, but moves so slowly at the observer’s view that it seems to be............
DComa = 98.5 ± 2.2 Mpc
H0 = 76.5 ± 2.2 km s−1 Mpc−1
—
Model says: H0 = 67.4 km s−1 Mpc−1
Let’s go with the model because observations are so boring.
Seriously, maybe the theory of Inflation needs an adjustment. We know dark matter exists because of its influence on the rotation rate of galaxies. BAO measurements confirmed the 1998 1a supernovae study, that the expansion of the universe is accelerating into a void where space and time does not yet exist.
Dark matter was the scaffolding upon which a vast network of galaxy clusters emerged. A Sloan mapping of the universe reveals the mind of God. Our knowledge of the universe will always be incomplete.
“If it can expand it must be finite. If it’s finite what’s around it making it finite? Nothingness? How can nothingness contain (surround) somethingness?”
Empty space is not nothing. It has properties. It is a container that can hold matter and energy, and it is intertwined with the dimension of time.
Einstein’s finite but unbounded model of the universe, as represented by a closed, positively curved spacetime, can be conceptually reconciled with the observed expansion of the universe within the framework of a black hole cosmology. This framework proposes that our observable universe resides within the event horizon of a massive black hole, where the expansion we observe is a consequence of the black hole’s spacetime curvature and the inherent properties of the universe within its event horizon.
Einstein’s model describes a finite universe with a closed, positively curved spatial geometry. This means that if you were to travel in a straight line in any direction, you would eventually return to your starting point, similar to traveling around the surface of a sphere.
Despite being finite, this model does not have a boundary or edge, as the universe is “wrapped around” itself.
Black hole cosmology proposes that our observable universe is confined within the event horizon of a massive black hole. The event horizon is the boundary beyond which nothing, not even light, can escape the black hole’s gravitational pull.
Within the event horizon, the spacetime curvature caused by the black hole’s immense mass would manifest as the expansion we observe. The expansion is not a movement into a pre-existing space but rather a stretching of spacetime itself, akin to the stretching of the surface of a balloon as it is inflated.
This model provides a way to reconcile the observed expansion of the universe with Einstein’s finite but unbounded model. The expansion is not a consequence of the universe expanding into something else, but rather a consequence of the curvature of spacetime within the black hole’s event horizon.
Since "3.26 million light years is a distance, using terms we're more familiar with, this is like saying it's expanding 76 miles an hour faster every three million miles away that it is. This means that the farther away it is, the faster it's accelerating. This means the farther away it is, the faster it dims. Therefore, we'll never be able to see things more distant.
This may simply be the way that it is, but it's not what we normally consider an acceleration to be. A normal acceleration is measured in miles per hour per hour, not miles per hour per mile. That, at least gives us some hope of ever seeing distant objects which will not dim so quickly.
Please forgive me, but that isn’t the point. WHat in the wide, wide world of sports is causing them to accelerate? What is feeding energy into the system to cause them to accelerate? If this was just the initial push from the Big Bang, the calcualtions would have already shown it. This is energy being added into the system.
If they’re too dim to see, we don’t know at all what’s out there. For instance, what if, at the time of the Big Bang, there was a large mass of material that “escaped” the gravity of the mass that surrounds us, and is now pulling us out toward them. That would mean they’re accelerating us. That would be slowing them down, while still accelerating us. This would all be happening beyond our ability to see them because they are too far away and too dim to see.
Not in all directions. The red shift is every planet out there, going away from us at excessive accelerations.
Great verses. I also think these apply.
Isaiah 42:5-6
New King James Version
Thus says God the Lord,
Who created the heavens and stretched them out,
Who spread forth the earth and that which comes from it,
Who gives breath to the people on it,
And spirit to those who walk on it
“I, the Lord, have called You in righteousness,
And will hold Your hand;
I will keep You and give You as a covenant to the people,
As a light to the Gentiles,
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