Thanks Red Badger.
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Posted on 04/26/2019 10:49:03 AM PDT by Red Badger
Explaining a discrepancy between what was happening 13 billion years ago and now may require new physics.
It's become clear that something in the cosmos just doesn't add up. The universe is getting bigger every second. In fact, it's expanding at a much faster rate than it should.
For some time now there's been a mismatch in observations of the early universe done with the European Space Agency's Planck Telescope and what astronomers see when they measure the more nearby, modern parts of space with NASA's Hubble Telescope. (Keep in mind that looking at distant parts of the universe with powerful telescopes is the same as looking back in time).
When scientists look at what was going on 13 billion years ago, via Planck, and then extrapolate that into the present, the results don't match what Hubble sees today. For several years, there's been an assumption that the disagreement is due to a lack of precision in the measurements. But as scientists have fine-tuned their tools, the discrepancy has remained. On Thursday, researchers using Hubble said the chances the mismatch is some sort of user error or fluke have gone from 1 in 3,000 to 1 in 100,000.
"The Hubble tension between the early and late universe may be the most exciting development in cosmology in decades," lead researcher and Nobel laureate Adam Riess of the Space Telescope Science Institute, which leads Hubble's science mission, said in a statement. "This mismatch has been growing and has now reached a point that is really impossible to dismiss as a fluke. This disparity could not plausibly occur just by chance."
The Hubble team's results have been accepted for publication in The Astrophysical Journal.
Riess says the discrepancy strongly suggests there's a piece missing in the puzzle that scientists have put together over the years to model the history of the universe.
One possible explanation could be the appearance of dark energy at some point long ago. It's now theorized that up to 70 percent of the universe may be made up of the mysterious stuff. A yet undiscovered and speedy particle in the universe that affects its expansion is another possibility, as is the idea that unseen dark matter might be pushing on the normal matter we can see more strongly than we thought.
The actual explanation remains a mystery. Riess and other scientists plan to continue fine-tuning their tools and measurements, but if the mismatch isn't due to human error, new physics may be needed to complete the puzzle.
"Previously, theorists would say to me, 'it can't be. It's going to break everything.' Now they are saying, 'we actually could do this,'" Riess said.
Fermi always did his work in ink.
That way he could go back and reexamine work he had scratched out as wrong.
Wouldn't that indicate that the universe is NOT infinite? But rather the universe is expanding like a balloon in a box that has 6 sides as its furthest boundaries?
Tolkien knew this years ago:
“I feel thin, sort of stretched, like butter scraped over too much bread.”
:)
Pretty soon it will expand into a parallel universe and all hell will break out.
Yay! One MORE thing they want me to worry about, which Mankind will NEVER have ANY control over!
What’s the over/under for the Dems turning this into some sort of ATM Machine at Taxpayer expense? *SNORT*
At least Brooklyn is not expanding. Well, at least for Billions of years.
It’s not expanding. It’s contracting. The entire Universe is “falling” down a huge black hole. The Big Bang is the black hole’s event horizon.
Galaxies farther “down” the hole are travelling faster than us and thus receding.
Galaxies not as far down are travelling slower than us and thus we are receding from them.
The net of all this appears to be an expanding universe, in that all galaxies appear to be increasing their distance from us.
LOL, GMTA. (see ‘66’)
The universe is trying to avoid crooked Hillary.
Thanks Red Badger.
I know why. Because it is. Prove me wrong.
As the Universe expands, the gravitational pull of nearby galaxies gets less and less, so that the expansion can appear to speed up......................
As the Universe expands, the gravitational pull of nearby galaxies gets less and less, so that the expansion can appear to speed up. The older galaxies were closer together, so the expansion was slower because of gravitational pull on each other......................
Again - I am not arguing any “science” position.
The report does not state clearly for the scientifically uninformed that telescope A, or telescope B appears to demonstrate a universe expanding faster than the other telescope.
They say (1) its expanding “faster than it should be” and (2) there is a discrepancy between Hubble and Plank. If they were good communicators they would say Hubble is demonstrating what may be a more rapidly expanding universe than what the Plank telescope indicates. BUT that is not what they say. They just say there is a discrepancy, period. The novice, the scientific uneducated is left to ask in which direction, from which telescope to which telescope, that discrepancy shows up.
Tony Shalhoub as Enrico Fermi in “Day One” (1989). Great film.
Never seen it!
I need to!
Better then the Oppenheimer TV series?
I’m pretty sure that greenhouse gasses are pushing the other celestial bodies away from us. Yes, algore will figure out how taxes will solve that.
“If the universe is expanding, what is it expanding into?................”
That is the ultimate, inexplicable mystery.
We’ll never know the answer. There’s not even a plausible theory/bullsh!t story for it.
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