High in the Chilean Atacama Desert, miles away from the radiance of light pollution, the mysterious Atacama Cosmology Telescope is in prime location for searching the skies for answers. The recent question on mind? Age of the universe, a cosmic quandary that can respond in different ways, depending on how you measure the accelerated expansion of the universe.
Recent paper published in the Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics have measured the extent of that expansion, known as the Hubble stable, using the telescope of the National Science Foundation in Chile.
The team found Hubble’s stability at 42 miles per second per megaparsec – meaning for every megaparsec, or 3.26 million light-years, the speed of global expansion is up 42 miles per second. The number detected by the international team of astronauts and physicists, after 730 days of observation running from 2013 to 2016, was almost the same as previously reported by the European Space Agency’s Planck satellite in 2013.
“Now we’ve got an answer where Planck and [Atacama Cosmology Telescope] agree, ”said Simone Aiola, a researcher at the Flatiron Institute’s Center for Computational Astrophysics and co-author of the paper. in a press release. “He says those difficult measurements are reliable. ”
There is a very big reason why it is worth rebalancing the stable: There are one or two ways to measure the degree of global expansion, from which the age of the globe can be deduced. You can calculate the rate based on stellar objects near us, such as Cepheid pulsating stars. You can also measure the amplitude by looking at the microwave cosmic background polarized light of the globe, the most visible visible radiation from the Big Bang, which is what the Atacama team did here. There is a difference in this dim light in its polarization, allowing scientists to measure how far the light has traveled and how far that travel has taken. That is why understanding the extent of global expansion is important: It changes how far the light has gone, and therefore, the age of everything.
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Here’s the rub: Both of these Hubble stable calculations have come up with very different levels—one 2019 study came up to nearly 46 miles per second per megaparsec, though another from the same year find a number that separated the difference between the other two. While the differences may be small, the different estimates span a range of hundreds of millions of years in determining how old our universe is. (The higher the stable, the younger the universe).
The decisions of the Atacama team put the global age at around 13.77 billion years. Our solar system is, by comparison, about 4.57 billion years old, and Homo sapiens it appeared somewhere about 300,000 years ago.
The different numbers so far do not mean that any party is wrong (although the team behind the new paper confirmed, working with better images of microwave cosmic backgrounds than the ones preceded by Planck, that the mathematics of the former team were strong). Yes, it certainly means that we miss something when it comes to how global expansion works.
The difference between local and distant fixed measurements of Hubble could mean that “there is a problem with one of the types of measurements that we do not define correctly, so there is a systemic problem of a kind with one measure or the other, ”said Michael Niemack, a psychologist at Cornell University and a recent co-author of the paper. “The most exciting possibility is that our cosmological model needs something. ”
Perhaps the best thing yet to come is the Atacama telescope, which first had its light in 2007 and has the advantage of being on the ground, making it easier to manage than a space-based telescope.
“We have not yet extracted all the information from the data we have already collected with the Atacama Cosmology Telescope,” said Steve Choi, a physiologist at Cornell University and lead author of the paper. “I hope we learn even more interesting physics about our universe with the upcoming experiments at Atacama, such as CCAT-prime and the Simons Observatory,” referring to two high-powered observatories that coming in the desert. The telescope in CCAT-prime was renamed the Fred Young Submillimeter Telescope in September, and will look at a number of cosmological features, while the Simons Observatory will focus its observation capabilities on a microwave cosmic background.
Perhaps one party that assesses the age of the universe is observing something in their mathematics – with the many unknown things of space science, and the completely unknown material, there is it is possible. But according to Niemack, there could be something so easy in the mix that would explain the different numbers.
“Maybe this is an advertisement that we’re just looking for something new and exciting that we didn’t know before about how our universe works,” he said.