The universe's expansion may actually have started to slow rather than accelerating at an ever-increasing rate as previously thought, a new study suggests.
"Remarkab...
There’s some wild stuff going on in astronomy. This particular hypothesis was made using baryonic acoustic oscillation (BAO) data. The idea is that the early universe was hot and dense, and random fluctuations would make certain areas more or less dense, like ripples in a pond. Then when the universe rapidly expanded, all those oscillations and over/under densities were frozen as they were, and we can look at the cosmic microwave background and the structure of the modern universe to see how those original changes in density evolved into modern galaxies and voids. This gives us a measuring stick for distance that’s completely independent of using the light of distant events. And BAO and standard candles like 1a supernovas basically agree with each other completely on the expansion rate, and only with higher precision modern instruments have we detected that the methods disagree on the rate of expansion. This paper is trying to square that circle by critically analyzing the validity of the data we measure.
There’s some wild stuff going on in astronomy. This particular hypothesis was made using baryonic acoustic oscillation (BAO) data. The idea is that the early universe was hot and dense, and random fluctuations would make certain areas more or less dense, like ripples in a pond. Then when the universe rapidly expanded, all those oscillations and over/under densities were frozen as they were, and we can look at the cosmic microwave background and the structure of the modern universe to see how those original changes in density evolved into modern galaxies and voids. This gives us a measuring stick for distance that’s completely independent of using the light of distant events. And BAO and standard candles like 1a supernovas basically agree with each other completely on the expansion rate, and only with higher precision modern instruments have we detected that the methods disagree on the rate of expansion. This paper is trying to square that circle by critically analyzing the validity of the data we measure.