DESI Begins

A new eye on the sky is about to add to our knowledge of dark energy.



It's interesting that in the list of funding agencies, NASA is absent. This goes to show you that many of these research activities that seem to be "astronomy-related" are not the sole domain of NASA. In fact, the area of particle-astrophysics is more closely related to particle physics than astronomy.

The video didn't clarify explicitly that in looking at the "spectrum" of light from each of these celestial bodies, one gets the radial velocity of these bodies with respect to us (i.e. via the amount of redshift), not its distance from us. That last piece of information can only be "deduced" using the radial velocity and the Hubble equation, i.e. the Hubble constant, a number that is still being refined.

Still, this new telescope is going to be quite exciting in revealing more of the mysteries of dark energy.

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Big Bang Disproved?!

Of course not! But this is still a fun video for you to watch, especially if you are not up to speed on (i) how we know that the universe is expanding and (ii) the current discrepancy in the measurement of the Hubble constant via two different methods.



But unlike politics or social interactions, discrepancies and disagreement in science are actually welcomed and a fundamental aspects of scientific progress. It is how we refine and polish our knowledge into a more accurate form. As Don Lincoln says at the end of the video, scientists love discrepancies. It means that there are more things that we don't know, and more opportunities to learn and discover something new.

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New Measurement of Hubble Constant Brings New Puzzle

The most extensive measurement of the Hubble constant based on observations made by the Hubble telescope (how appropriate) has revealed a discrepancy between its value and those made earlier by ESA's Planck satellite.

Planck’s result predicted that the Hubble constant value should now be 67 kilometers per second per megaparsec (3.3 million light-years), and could be no higher than 69 kilometers per second per megaparsec. This means that for every 3.3 million light-years farther away a galaxy is from us, it is moving 67 kilometers per second faster. But Riess’s team measured a value of 73 kilometers per second per megaparsec, indicating galaxies are moving at a faster rate than implied by observations of the early universe.

The Hubble data are so precise that astronomers cannot dismiss the gap between the two results as errors in any single measurement or method. “Both results have been tested multiple ways, so barring a series of unrelated mistakes,” Riess explained, “it is increasingly likely that this is not a bug but a feature of the universe.”

The arXiv version of the paper can be found here.

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Determining The Hubble Constant

Ethan Siegel has a nice article on the pitfalls in determining one of the most important constants in our universe, the Hubble constant. The article describes why this constant is so important, and all the ramifications that come from it.

As you read this, notice all the "background knowledge" that one must have to be able to know how well certain things are known, and what are the assumptions and uncertainties in each of the methods and values that we use. All of these need to be known, and people using them must be aware of them.

Compare that to the decision we make everyday on things we accept in social policies and politics.

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Faster-Than-Light Expansion? Not So Fast, Buddy!

This is a very common question that I come across. Is the universe expanding faster than the speed of light? If so, then isn't this proof that SR basic postulate is incorrect?

Most people who asked that question usually don't have an understanding of General Relativity. But even for those who do, especially students studying that subject, a serious confusion can occur when it is applied to outlying, sufficiently-far away celestial bodies, where speed greater than c can be achieved.

This is a nice paper, to be published in AJP, that addressed this issue, and the restriction on the application of the Hubble Law.

Abstract: Naively applying Hubble's law to a sufficiently distant object gives a receding velocity larger than the speed of light. By discussing a very similar situation in special relativity, we argue that Hubble's law is meaningful only for nearby objects with non-relativistic receding speeds. To support this claim, we note that in a curved spacetime manifold it is not possible to directly compare tangent vectors at different points, and thus there is no natural definition of relative velocity between two spatially separated objects in cosmology. We clarify the geometrical meaning of the Hubble's receding speed v by showing that in a Friedmann-Robertson-Walker spacetime if the four-velocity vector of a comoving object is parallel-transported along the straight line in flat comoving coordinates to the position of a second comoving object, then v/c actually becomes the rapidity of the local Lorentz transformation, which maps the fixed four-velocity vector to the transported one. 

It also contains several references that tackle this apparent faster-than-light issue in terms of universe expansion. Hopefully, this will answer that vexing and common question.

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Hubble Space Telescope Refined Hubble Constant

The Hubble Constant is now better known and more precisely known after the latest set of measurement by the Hubble Space Telescope.

The new value for the expansion rate, known as the Hubble constant, or H0 (after Edwin Hubble who first measured the expansion of the universe nearly a century ago), is 74.2 kilometers per second per megaparsec (error margin of ± 3.6). The results agree closely with an earlier measurement gleaned from Hubble of 72 ± 8 km/sec/megaparsec, but are now more than twice as precise.
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This new, more precise value of the Hubble constant was used to test and constrain the properties of dark energy, the form of energy that produces a repulsive force in space, which is causing the expansion rate of the universe to accelerate.

By bracketing the expansion history of the universe between today and when the universe was only approximately 380,000 years old, the astronomers were able to place limits on the nature of the dark energy that is causing the expansion to speed up. (The measurement for the far, early universe is derived from fluctuations in the cosmic microwave background, as resolved by NASA's Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe, WMAP, in 2003.)

Their result is consistent with the simplest interpretation of dark energy: that it is mathematically equivalent to Albert Einstein's hypothesized cosmological constant, introduced a century ago to push on the fabric of space and prevent the universe from collapsing under the pull of gravity. (Einstein, however, removed the constant once the expansion of the universe was discovered by Edwin Hubble.)

There's less wiggle room now for various theories of Dark Energy.

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