cosmic expansion
At Nature: Debate on universe expansion NOT settled by recent findings
At New Scientist: There’s a basic fact about the universe that we “still don’t understand”
Will the debate over the expansion of the universe “unravel” physics?
The early universe was flat to a “suspicious” one part in a million
An “expert voice” astrophysicist explains that the Big Bang is now the “vanilla Big Bang,” which is unpopular because it doesn’t explain all observations: The Big Bang model is our most successful explanation for the history of the universe that we live in, and it’s ridiculously easy to encapsulate its core framework in a single, T-shirtable sentence… But But there’s no reason for our universe to be flat. At large scales it could’ve had any old curvature it wanted. Our cosmos could’ve been shaped like a giant, multidimensional beach ball, or a horse-riding saddle. But, no, it picked flat. And not just a little bit flat. For us to measure no curvature to a precision of a few percent in Read More ›
“Expanding blueberry muffin” picture of the universe collapses
And cosmologists race to win a “great cosmic bake-off” to produce a new one, says astrophysicist: Just as cosmological measurements have became so precise that the value of the Hubble constant was expected to be known once and for all, it has been found instead that things don’t make sense. Instead of one we now have two showstopping results. On the one side we have the new very precise measurements of the Cosmic Microwave Background – the afterglow of the Big Bang – from the Planck mission, that has measured the Hubble Constant to be about 46,200 miles per hour per million light years (or using cosmologists’ units 67.4 km/s/Mpc). On the other side we have new measurements of pulsating Read More ›