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The creation is moving too fast and nobody know why .
Back in the early years of the universe , mightily after the Big Bang , everything blasted by from everything else . We can still see the spark from that bang , by watch over very faraway parts of the world where lighttakes gazillion of years to reach our scope . And we can evaluate how fast things were move in those faraway spotsBased on that speed , we can depend how fast the existence should be amplify today .
A cepheid in the Milky Way, RS Puppis, is seen through the Hubble Space Telescope.
But when astronomer have tried to directly measurehow fast the universe is expanding today — a more difficult project , because everything is farther apart now — thing seem to be move faster than those calculations would prognosticate . And a new paper , based on extremely detailed observations taken using theHubble Space Telescope , appear to confirm that finding : Everything is moving about 9 per centum too fast .
And still , nobody knows why . [ Does the Universe Have an Edge ? ]
Earlier reflexion of that increase speed still had a 1 in 3,000 luck that astronomers were wrong , which is considered pretty high for an astrophysics result . This new paper improves astronomers ' confidence , with just a 1 in 100,000 opportunity of being ground on an data-based error . It ’s due for publication in the April 25 issue of The Astrophysical Journal Letters , and is available on the preprint serverarXiv .
" This mismatch has been grow and has now hand a full point that is really insufferable to dismiss as a fluke . This is not what we expect , " lead writer Adam Riess , a Johns Hopkins University Nobel laureate and astrophysicist , allege in a financial statement .
The researchers relied on the same tool that uranologist Edwin Hubbleused to show that the creation was expanding back in 1929 : a class of pulsate stars called cepheids .
Cepheids , the astronomer Henrietta S. Leavitt had demonstrate in a 1908 report in the journalAnnals of the Harvard College Observatory , pulsation in unmediated proportion to their brightness . That means that astronomers can figure out exactly how vivid a cepheid should be based on how tight it ’s pulse . Then , by see how dim it take care from Earth , they can severalise how much luminousness it ’s lost along the means , and thus how far off it is .
To value the pace of theuniverse ’s expansion , uranologist check the distance to cepheids in nearby and faraway galaxies . But that ’s usually a slow job to do exactly , with the Hubble able to precisely mensurate just one removed cepheid at a time . The researchers develop a method acting to admit the infinite scope to " drift " as it project the stars , fancy more than one at the same time and drastically increasing the precision of their overall distance measurement .
What they find directly contradicts predictions made establish on observations from theEuropean Space Agency ’s Planck satellite , which value the speed of the universe of discourse 380,000 years after the Big Bang .
So what does it mean that the universe is almost certainly moving too fast ?
" This is not just two experiments disaccord , " Riess say . " We are measuring something fundamentally different . One is a measure of how fast the universe is expanding today , as we see it . The other is a prediction base on the purgative of the early universe and on mensuration of how degenerate it ought to be amplify . If these values do n’t concord , there becomes a very substantial likelihood that we ’re miss something in the cosmological model that connects the two earned run average . "
Riess does n’t know what the escape thing is , but for now , he plan to keep refining his measurements .
Originally write onLive Science .
