| Type | Comments Since You Last CheckedArticle | Source | Last Checked |  |
 |
Updated continuously by citizens like you, Newsvine is an instant reflection of what the world is talking about at any given moment.
Article Source: Space.comOur universe may be 15% larger and older than we thought, according to new measurements of the distance to a nearby galaxy.
Researchers led by Alceste Bonanos at the Carnegie Institution of Washington, US, used data from telescopes including the 10-metre Keck-II telescope in Hawaii, US, to measure the distance to a pair of stars in the Triangulum Galaxy.
.......wow.....
#1 - Fri Aug 4, 2006 3:04 PM EDTThis is certainly very fascinating, but this is also one of those bits of research that I'm really going to need to see some independent corroboration on. I don't mean to question Ms. Bonanos' or her colleague's methods, but I would like to see if we can get a similar timeline from other observations. It sounds like their research is very cutting edge and there is always the question of reproducibility and accuracy when you're in the vanguard.
I agree of course. The fact that the age of the universe is being debated is just fascinating in itself. I look forward to more research along these lines.
An extra two billion years? I'll be damned. That's a whole lot of extra time for things we don't know about yet, to have happened.
#2 - Fri Aug 4, 2006 3:25 PM EDTThe Hubble's "constant" has just become less constant.
According to Hubble's law distant galaxies are receding from us with a speed approximately equal to the product of the Hubble constant and the distance to the galaxy. Hubble's "constant" is independent of distance, but decreases slowly in time as the expansion is slowed by the gravitational pull of each galaxy on all the others. There is no agreement on its present value. Estimates lie between 15 and 30 km/s per second per million light-years.
The new research actually shows that the Hubble's constant may be 15 percent smaller. By the way the last similar news were from 1999 - scientists claimed to have measures the Hubble's constant with an error of only 10 percent. They were obviously mistaken.
Links
http://www.suite101.com/article.cfm/astronomy/13754
http://staff.imsa.edu/science/astro/astrometry/hubble.html
http://www-scf.usc.edu/~kallos/Universe.htm
And a more general but perhaps the most interesting source is here
http://ircamera.as.arizona.edu/astr_250/Lectures/Lec_25sml.htm
#3 - Sat Aug 5, 2006 4:31 AM EDTIvan: Thank you very much for weighing in on this. I had been very curious to hear some of your thoughts on this article.
You're in Easy Mode. If you prefer, you can use XHTML Mode instead. |
Log In | Register
