did the universe expand faster than light

Riess is the lead researcher on the newly released paper, which has been accepted for publication in the Astrophysical Journal. And today, astronomers like Nobel laureate Adam Riess are using the Hubble telescope to do just the same – but with far greater precision. Edwin Hubble himself used this information to make one of the first measurements of his constant. Since more distant stars appear dimmer, that means astronomers can use the timing of the star’s cycle and how bright it appears to measure the star’s distance. It’s a discovery we can thank Harvard astronomer Henrietta Swan Leavitt for she first discovered that the intrinsic brightness of one of these stars is directly connected to how long it takes to cycle from dim to bright. Astronomers look at Cepheid variables – stars that change their brightnesses on rhythmic, predictable timescales – to measure distances. The scientists using Hubble to measure cosmic expansion are following a tradition set down by the pioneers of this field. But actually measuring the distance to a star or galaxy can be quite tricky. The bigger the shift, the faster the object is moving. And measuring the speed of a star or galaxy is surprisingly straightforward. The light from any cosmic object moving away from Earth is shifted toward lower frequency, redder colors, just like how an ambulance siren gives off a lower pitch as it’s driving away from you. The Hubble Constant is a measure of how fast a galaxy is moving compared to how far away it is. At this point, something is definitely fishy, and astronomers need to understand why. But in a study released Wednesday, scientists say they’ve refined the Hubble measurements, doubling down on the idea that today’s universe is expanding faster than it was in the past, and dropping the odds of a mistake to 1 in 100,000. At the time, astronomers said the odds were something like 1 in 3,000 that the disagreements were a fluke. And mysteriously, the number it found for our current expansion was some 9 percent off from the expansion rate of the early universe, as measured by the European Space Agency’s Planck spacecraft. In more recent years, astronomers have measured the expansion rate of today’s universe using the Hubble Space Telescope. Astronomers like Edwin Hubble first noticed that every distant galaxy they could measure seemed to be moving away from Earth – and the farther they were, the faster they receded. Scientists have known that the universe is expanding for around a century. But when astronomers actually measure today’s universe, they find a faster rate of expansion. Studies of the early universe, looking at the era just after the Big Bang, tell us that the cosmos should be expanding at one speed.

For a while now, astronomers have been confronting a conundrum.

Did the universe expand faster than light