Hubble Tension tagged posts

Is Earth inside a huge void? ‘Sound of Big Bang’ hints so

If we are located in a region with below-average density such as the green dot, then matter would flow away from us due to stronger gravity from the surrounding denser regions, as shown by the red arrows.
If we are located in a region with below-average density such as the green dot, then matter would flow away from us due to stronger gravity from the surrounding denser regions, as shown by the red arrows.
Credit
Moritz Haslbauer and Zarija Lukic
Licence type
Attribution (CC BY 4.0)

Earth and our entire Milky Way galaxy may sit inside a mysterious giant hole which makes the cosmos expand faster here than in neighbouring regions of the universe, astronomers say.

Their theory is a potential solution to the ‘Hubble tension’ and could help confirm the true age of our universe, which is estimated to be around 13.8 billion years old.

The latest research – shared at the Royal Astronomical Society’s National Astronomy Meeting (NAM) in Durham – shows that sound waves from the early universe, &...

Read More

A slowly spinning universe could solve the Hubble tension

The universe could be spinning
The Whirlpool Galaxy, M51, is a spiral galaxy located 31 million light-years away. Credit: NASA

A new study in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society by researchers including István Szapudi of the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa Institute for Astronomy suggests the universe may rotate—just extremely slowly. The finding could help solve one of astronomy’s biggest puzzles.

“To paraphrase the Greek philosopher Heraclitus of Ephesus, who famously said ‘panta rhei’ (everything moves), we thought that perhaps panta kykloutai—everything turns,” said Szapudi.

Current models say the universe expands evenly in all directions, with no sign of rotation. This idea fits most of what astronomers observe...

Read More

A New Measurement could Change our Understanding of the Universe

The cosmic distance ladder. © NASA, ESA, A.Feild (STScI), and A.Riess (STScI/JHU)

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...

Read More

Superhorizon Modes Can Explain Hubble Tension

The sketch depicts a perturbation of very large wavelength, larger than the size of the maximum distance light could have travelled since the origin of the Universe. The volume inside is the visible universe. (Image by Prabhakar Tiwari) 

A research team led by Dr. Prabhakar Tiwari from the National Astronomical Observatories of Chinese Academy of Sciences (NAOC) has found that superhorizon modes could explain the observed Hubble tension.

Their findings were published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters on Jan. 18.

It is generally believed that the universe is isotropic and homogeneous on large distance scales. This hypothesis forms the basis of the standard Big Bang cosmology, called the cosmological principle (CP)...

Read More