We’ve all heard the of the fact that the universe is always expanding, right? While this little factoid is probably engrained in the heads of every former student, few people really dig deep enough to understand the physics behind it. Now, with new data being released from the Hubble Space Telescope, we may have even more information turning this factoid into a true mind-blower! According to data from the Hubble Space Telescope, our universe may actually be expanding faster than we could have ever guessed. How did we find this out? What does this mean exactly? Let’s take a closer look by learning from the researchers themselves.
Adam Riess is a Nobel laureate and the lead researcher on the documentation that has been released revolving around the expansion of our universe. Reiss pioneered a study that looked closely at the data-mining methods of the Hubble Space Telescope in order to learn some new information. For those that don’t know, the Hubble Space Telescope can roughly place a rate on our universe’s expansion by measuring the distance between stars while focusing on how they brighten and dim in a specific pattern. This method is known around the scientific community by the term ‘the Hubble Constant’.
The information that Reiss managed to pull, which has the space world in a frenzy, has to do with something known as a Cepheid variable. These variables brighten and dim, as we pointed out above, but what was shocking is that eight of the previously recorded variables in the Milky Way are 10x farther away than we ever had expected. Of course, the Hubble Space Telescope isn’t the only piece of machinery in this information. The European Space Agency launched the Planck Satellite for a four-year mission to map all of the radiation that was still floating around from our cosmic Big Bang. The results of these observations allowed us to create what we had thought was an accurate Hubble constant — this was not the case. Instead, these Planck readings are now measuring out at 9% lower than Riessnew Hubble readings.
Riess and his team went over their measurements from their tests an inordinate amount of times in order to check for human error on their end, but there was none. Riess calls this new information a ‘feature of the universe’. With this kind of information always being released, we’re ecstatic to see what comes next.
