It may impact the 2011 Nobel Prize:
The few thousand galaxies closest to us move in a vast ‘bubble’ that is 250 million light years in diameter, where the average density of matter is half as large as for the rest of the universe. This is the hypothesis put forward by a theoretical physicist to solve a conundrum that has been splitting the scientific community for a decade: at what speed is the universe expanding?
Université de Genève, “Expanding universe: We may be in a vast bubble” at ScienceDaily
Our physics color commentator, Rob Sheldon, comments,
This professor at Geneva proposes to resolve the “Hubble tension” between the PLANCK consortium value of 67 km/s/Mpc and the astronomy consensus 72 km/s/Mpc by positing a giant 250Mpc bubble around the Milky Way galaxy. It’s not a new idea (see #5 in archived 2011 link below), but it sounds like he’s put some work into making the bubble more defined.
But what he doesn’t say, is that this invalidates the 2011 Nobel prize which assumed at most a 100Mpc radius disturbance in the supernovae Ia spectra. So now a French cosmologist is supporting the Oxford cosmologist Subir Sarkar in refuting the US-dominated 2011 Nobel prize consensus.
Looks like a dethronement, or rather, a defenestration of the US dominance. Who knows, maybe they’ll take the prize back and I can unblock Stockholm on my phone.
Stay tuned. That 2011 Prize for gravitational waves has often been a topic of conversation here.
Rob Sheldon, is the author of The Long Ascent I and The Long Ascent II.