Day by day progress in astronomy is proving helpful in understanding the new dimension of the universe. Thanks to the spread of knowledge over the past century, scientists have succeeded in understanding how the universe works. The more we are getting to know about it, the more new questions are coming in front of us and our urge to solve them is increasing. One of these unresolved questions is how fast is our universe expanding?
It was in the 1920s that we learned that our universe was constantly expanding. The biggest proof of which is that the farther the galaxy is from us, the faster it is moving further away from us. Which is clearly evidence that the universe is expanding. In the 1990s, scientists observed an accelerating rate of expansion of the universe. According to him, our universe is expanding much faster than we predicted. This rate of expansion is currently measured using the "Hubble Constant". NASA scientists were successful in measuring this expansion through the Hubble Telescope, according to them, the expansion of the universe is happening at about 9 percent faster than estimated. Significantly, the unit of measurement for the "Hubble Constant" is kilometer per megasec - which is equal to three million light years. In 1998, two teams of researchers found that the rate of expansion of the universe accelerated with distance. Due to which the universe has been filled with a mysterious "dark energy". For this he was awarded the Nobel Prize in 2011.
Scientists also believe that there are some shortcomings in our cosmological knowledge, due to which we are unable to know exactly what actually happened after the Big-Bang theory of the origin of the universe. Until recently, it seemed that the rate of expansion measured by the Hubble constant was constantly changing. Using different techniques, scientists have found different measurements and have revealed mysterious discrepancies. But in a new study published in the journal Science, a new method of measuring the expansion of the universe has been presented, which may be helpful in removing the veil from this mystery.
What is the rate of expansion of the Universe?
Estimation and observation of the universe by the European Space Agency's Planck satellite give estimates of the rate of expansion of the universe, but they do not match the rate of expansion of the universe obtained by the Hubble constant.
There is still a problem in accurately estimating the rate of spread. According to two different methods, this rate of expansion can be 67.4 and 73 Hubble constant. By the turn of the century, scientists had agreed that the rate was about 70 kilometers per second per megaparsec. In a paper published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters, Rees, a professor of physics and astronomy at the Johns Hopkins University, and his colleagues said that the difference in the data on the rate of expansion of the universe is increasing. This gap probably cannot be bridged. This is not just a matter of disagreements between the two experiments. We are trying to measure something that is fundamentally different. But now a study by researchers at the Max Planck Institute of Astrophysics in Germany describes a new way of measuring the accelerating expansion in the universe.
According to him, this rate of expansion is closer to 82.4 kilometers per mega sec, which is slightly higher than previous calculations - although that is not ruling out that there is an error of 10 percent. Which means, the rate can be as low as 74 or as high as 90. The new calculations are based on how light bends around larger galaxies. Both measurements have been reported to be accurate. Scientists believe that the difference between the different methods does not mean that there is an error in their calculations, but that this discrepancy in the rate of expansion of the universe may be related to the estimated trajectory after the bing-bang. Max Planck, a cosmologist at the Institute and a researcher of this research, told that this anomaly may be related to some such mysteries of our universe that happened earlier and about which we do not know much. He conceded that although the study had an error of 10 percent, a major problem that could not lead to accurate measurements of the Hubble constant, its method also pointed out that there are some fundamental problems with the cosmological theory.
To understand the reason for this discrepancy, we need to better connect and understand the distance scale between the very near and the very distant universe.
This new paper offers a neat approach to this challenge. Many estimates of the rate of expansion depend on the precise measurement of the distance between them. But it is difficult to actually do this, because we cannot measure the whole universe using just a single tape. This difference in estimation also indicates that there is something very important in this which we are unable to grasp that can solve this mystery of the expansion of the universe.
The truth is that so far we have only understood that our universe is expanding, but the rate at which it is expanding is still an unresolved question. But we hope that in the coming time, soon this mystery will also be revealed and we will be able to understand this universe in a better way.
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