CMB tagged posts

As the universe evolves, scientists expect large cosmic structures to grow at a certain rate: dense regions such as galaxy clusters would grow denser, while the void of space would grow emptier.

But University of Michigan researchers have discovered that the rate at which these large structures grow is slower than predicted by Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity.

They also showed that as dark energy accelerates the universe’s global expansion, the suppression of the cosmic structure growth that the researchers see in their data is even more prominent than what the theory pr...

When it comes to measuring how fast the Universe is expanding, the result depends on which side of the Universe you start from. A recent study has calibrated the best cosmic yardsticks to unprecedented accuracy, shedding new light on what’s known as the Hubble tension.

The Universe is expanding — but how fast exactly? The answer appears to depend on whether you estimate the cosmic expansion rate — referred to as the Hubble’s constant, or H0 — based on the echo of the Big Bang (the cosmic microwave background, or CMB) or you measure H0 directly based on today’s stars and galaxies. This problem, known as the Hubble tension, has puzzled astrophysicists and cosmologists around the world.

A study carrie...

Using known distances of 50 galaxies from Earth to refine calculations in Hubble’s constant, a research team led by a University of Oregon astronomer estimates the age of the universe at 12.6 billion years.

Approaches to date the Big Bang, which gave birth to the universe, rely on mathematics and computational modeling, using distance estimates of the oldest stars, the behavior of galaxies and the rate of the universe’s expansion. The idea is to compute how long it would take all objects to return to the beginning.

A key calculation for dating is the Hubble’s constant, named after Edwin Hubble who first calculated the universe’s expansion rate in 1929...

The map of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) sky produced by the Planck satellite. Red represents slightly warmer regions, and blue slightly cooler regions. The Cold Spot is shown in the inset, with coordinates on the x- and y-axes, and the temperature difference in millionths of a degree in the scale at the bottom. Credit: ESA and Durham University. Click for a full size image

A supervoid is unlikely to explain a ‘Cold Spot’ in the cosmic microwave background, according to the results of a new survey, leaving room for exotic explanations like a collision between universes. The cosmic microwave background (CMB), a relic of the Big Bang, covers the whole sky. At 2.73 degrees above 0K, the CMB has some anomalies, including the Cold Spot. This feature, about 0...