You probably heard that the universe is constantly expanding. There’s a bit of an update to that: it’s still expanding, and it’s happening far faster than scientists previously thought. They have no idea why, and seem just a bit concerned about that.
All the cosmic math should add up, but it doesn’t. That’s the conclusion reached by H0 Distance Network (H0DN) Collaboration, a collection of 37 researchers from across the world, representing a variety of research institutions, who published their findings in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics.
The expansive team combined nearly every method of measuring cosmic distances into a single measurement. 73.5 kilometers per second per 3.26 million light-years. That’s the rate at which the universe is currently expanding. That doesn’t mean anything to most people, but to the research team, it matters quite a bit because the speed at which we used to think the universe was expanding according to the standard model of cosmology was closer to 67. It doesn’t sound like a significant difference, but in physics terms, it’s so big it’s actually kind of alarming.
Universe Expansion Is Measured With the Cosmic Distance Ladder
This means that the discrepancy is well beyond what could reasonably be chalked up to chance or minor technical error. Either the universe is expanding significantly faster than we thought, or there is a major structural problem in how we’ve been calculating its expansion.
To reach this conclusion, the researchers relied on something called the cosmic distance ladder, which is a chain of overlapping calculation techniques that starts with geometric measurements of nearby objects and then extends outward using a variety of celestial bodies like Cepheid stars, red giants, and Type Ia supernovae. The team turned that ladder into a web and cross-checked methods against each other to account for any biases.
All of that is to say that this new method stands up to scrutiny a bit more than the previous methods. And if it does prove to be correct, it means there are big, fundamental gaps in our understanding of all sorts of space phenomena, from dark energy to gravity. Either way, the major takeaway here is that the universe isn’t playing nice with our calculations of its expansion, and no matter what researchers do, no matter what new innovative methods they use to calculate it, they just keep reaching the same conclusion again and again: something weird is happening, and they don’t know why.
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