NASA Just Made An Announcement That Will Make Your Blood Run Cold…
For a long time, scientists and astronomers have been fascinated by the study of the universe’s expansion rate.
The field has progressed slowly but steadily from the initial studies conducted by astronomers Edwin P. Hubble and Georges Lemaitre in the 1920s to the discovery of ‘dark energy’ at the end of the 1990s.
However, the Hubble Space Telescope has provided scientists with a massive amount of data to study, and NASA believes that something unusual is happening in the universe, given how quickly it is expanding.
The Space Telescope Science Institute’s Adam Riess led a team of astronomers who found a “discrepancy.”
According to NASA, the discrepancy is between the expansion rate measured in the local universe and independent observations made shortly after the big bang. So far, scientists have used a unit of measurement known as the Hubble Constant to calculate the rate of expansion of the universe.
However, NASA was unable to provide a concrete explanation for the discrepancy, instead referring to it as “something weird.”
In a statement, Adam Riess of the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) and the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore said, “You are getting the most precise measure of the expansion rate for the universe from the gold standard of telescopes and cosmic mile markers.”
“This is what the Hubble Space Telescope was built to do, using the best techniques we know to do it. This is likely Hubble’s magnum opus, because it would take another 30 years of Hubble’s life to even double this sample size,” he added, commenting on the research.
SH0ES – or Supernova, H0, for the Equation of State of Dark Energy – is a scientific organization led by Riess that is dedicated to studying the universe’s expansion rate.
For the past 30 years, the Hubble telescope has been collecting data and it shows that, while the rate of expansion was predicted to be 67.5 kilometers per second per mega parsec with a margin of error of 0.5, the current rate of expansion is around 73.
Dr. Kathy Romer of the Dark Energy Survey told the Daily Mail, “The universe is not only expanding, but it is expanding faster and faster as time goes by,” she said.
“What we’d expect is that the expansion would get slower and slower as time goes by, because it has been nearly 14 billion years since the Big Bang.”
Astronomers have predicted that the universe will double in size in the next 10 billion years based on the data gathered from the discrepancy. This prediction was made after Riess and his team narrowed the rate of cosmic expansion to a precision of just over 1%, according to NASA. Dr. Hubble proposed that the farther a galaxy is from us, the faster it appears to be moving away.
However, the cosmic expansion rate was so uncertain in the early days of Hubble’s operation that the results suggested the universe was eight to twenty billion years old, rather than the current estimate of around 14 billion.
“The Hubble constant is a very special number. It can be used to thread a needle from the past to the present for an end-to-end test of our understanding of the universe,” explained Dr. Licia Verde, a cosmologist at ICREA and the ICC-University of Barcelona.
“This took a phenomenal amount of detailed work.”