- #1
Tanelorn
- 906
- 15
Dark Energy Cosmology makes the front page again:
In a new study, a team of researchers led by Adam Riess of the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, report that they've calculated how fast the universe is expanding to a greater degree of accuracy than ever before, shrinking the error bars on their measurements by about 30 percent.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/space/20110315/sc_space/bizarredarkenergytheorygetsboostfromnewmeasurements
"Theorists have come up with very creative ways to get out of dark energy, which would be great because we don't understand dark energy very well and it would be nice to find a way that the universe was simpler," Riess said.
One such alternative is the idea that our cosmic neighborhood —the solar system and the whole Milky Way galaxy — happens to sit at the center of a relatively empty bubble of space eight billion light-years across.
If this were the case, we would measure the same accelerated expansion rate we do, except it would be an illusion created by our special position in the void.
However, Clifton cautioned that the new measurements do not disqualify all versions of the void model. In some more complicated scenarios in which the big bang did not happen at the same time at all points in space, this hypothesis could still be valid."
This big bang not happening at the same time and at all points in space is also one of my pet hypotheses; A continuous big bang in a universe so big that it still appears homogeneous.
In a new study, a team of researchers led by Adam Riess of the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, report that they've calculated how fast the universe is expanding to a greater degree of accuracy than ever before, shrinking the error bars on their measurements by about 30 percent.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/space/20110315/sc_space/bizarredarkenergytheorygetsboostfromnewmeasurements
"Theorists have come up with very creative ways to get out of dark energy, which would be great because we don't understand dark energy very well and it would be nice to find a way that the universe was simpler," Riess said.
One such alternative is the idea that our cosmic neighborhood —the solar system and the whole Milky Way galaxy — happens to sit at the center of a relatively empty bubble of space eight billion light-years across.
If this were the case, we would measure the same accelerated expansion rate we do, except it would be an illusion created by our special position in the void.
However, Clifton cautioned that the new measurements do not disqualify all versions of the void model. In some more complicated scenarios in which the big bang did not happen at the same time at all points in space, this hypothesis could still be valid."
This big bang not happening at the same time and at all points in space is also one of my pet hypotheses; A continuous big bang in a universe so big that it still appears homogeneous.
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