What Do 600 Hubble Survey Results Reveal About Cosmic Expansion?

[yuiop]

I came across this interesting Havard article at http://www.cfa.harvard.edu/~huchra/hubble.plot.dat listing over 600 Hubble survey results dating back to about 1929 and up to 2008. I put all the data into into a spreadsheet and using over 500 Hubble estimates from 1960 onwards I got an average value of about 67.1 which was lower than I was expecting because the a lot of the early results were much higher than the current estimate of about 71

Anyway, I have attached the spreadsheet which has all the data separated into | Hubble value | + error | - error | date | etc fields in numerical format which might be helpful to someone interested in doing a statistical analysis of the historical data.

 

[Garth]

Your value of 67.1 seems about right.

In 1985 Michael Rowan Robinson made a survey of all measurements of H₀ and came up with a figure of 67 km/s/Mpc.

Recently he said (RAS 2008 Presidential Address):

Local direct estimates of H₀ are in the range 62 - 72 km/s/Mpc, with an uncertainty of 10%.
The CMB fluctuation estimates of H₀ lie in the range 65 - 73 km/s/Mpc, depending on the assumptions made, with an uncertainty of 2%.

It is interesting that your historical average is consistent with these values, the scatter was all about the same value with the uncertainty decreasing as time went on.

Garth