does the universe expand faster than light

There is, however, a silver lining: warp technology may have radical applications beyond space travel. Now, a recent paper by US-based physicists Alexey Bobrick and Gianni Martire has resolved many of those issues and generated a lot of buzz.īut while Bobrick and Martire have managed to substantially demystify warp technology, their work actually suggests that faster-than-light travel will remain out of reach for beings like us, at least for the time being. It was an intriguing idea-even NASA has been researching it at the Eagleworks laboratory-but Alcubierre’s proposal contained problems that seemed insurmountable. ApJ 875, 145 doi: 10.In 1994, physicist Miguel Alcubierre proposed a radical technology that would allow faster-than-light travel: the warp drive, a hypothetical way to skirt around the universe’s ultimate speed limit by bending the fabric of reality. The Local Perspective on the Hubble Tension: Local Structure Does Not Impact Measurement of the Hubble Constant. The team’s results were published in the Astrophysical Journal. Or perhaps dark energy, an unknown form of energy that pervades space, is responsible for accelerating the expansion of the Universe.Īlthough the astronomers don’t have an answer to this perplexing disparity, they intend to continue using Hubble to reduce the uncertainty in their measure of the Hubble constant, which they hope to decrease to 1%.

An invisible form of matter called dark matter may interact more strongly with normal matter than astronomers previously thought. Various scenarios have been proposed to explain the discrepancy, but there is yet to be a conclusive answer.

It’s going to break everything.’ Now they are saying, ‘we actually could do this’,” Professor Riess said. “Previously, theorists would say to me, ‘It can’t be. The results were combined with observations made by the Araucaria Project, a collaboration between astronomers from Europe, Chile and the United States to measure the distance to the Large Magellanic Cloud by observing the dimming of light as one star passes in front of its partner in a binary-star system. This avoids the more time-consuming step of anchoring the telescope with guide stars to observe each star. Professor Riess and colleagues used an efficient observing technique called Drift And Shift (DASH) using Hubble as a ‘point-and-shoot’ camera to snap quick images of the bright stars. The team analyzed the light from 70 Cepheid variables in a neighboring satellite galaxy known as the Large Magellanic Cloud, now calculated to be 162,000 light-years away.īecause these stars brighten and dim at predictable rates, and the periods of these variations give us their luminosity and hence distance, astronomers use them as cosmic mileposts. This disparity could not plausibly occur by chance,” Professor Riess said. “This mismatch has been growing and has now reached a point that is really impossible to dismiss as a fluke. The number indicates that the Universe is expanding at a rate about 9% faster than that implied by Planck’s observations of the early Universe, which give a value for the Hubble constant of 41.6 miles (67 km) per second per megaparsec. This means that for every 3.3 million light-years farther away a galaxy is from us, it appears to be moving 46 miles per second faster, as a result of the expansion of the Universe. The new estimate of the Hubble constant is 46 miles (74.03 km) per second per megaparsec. “The Hubble tension between the early and late Universe may be the most exciting development in cosmology in decades,” said Nobel Laureate and the project’s leader Professor Adam Riess, from the Space Telescope Science Institute and Johns Hopkins University. These most precise Hubble measurements to date bolster the idea that new physics may be needed to explain the mismatch. This is a significant gain from an earlier estimate, less than a year ago, of a chance of 1 in 3,000. The latest Hubble data lower the possibility that the discrepancy is only a fluke to 1 in 100,000. Instead, as Hubble astronomers continue to ‘tighten the bolts’ on the accuracy of their measurements, the discordant values remain stubbornly at odds. The inconsistency is between Hubble measurements of today’s expansion rate of the Universe and the expansion rate as measured by ESA’s Planck satellite, which observes the conditions of the early Universe just 380,000 years after the Big Bang.įor years, astronomers have been assuming this discrepancy would go away due to some instrumental or observational fluke. This image shows the entire Large Magellanic Cloud, with some of the brightest objects marked.

Does the universe expand faster than light