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An Older, Larger Universe
Posted by
Hemos
on Mon Aug 07, 2006 08:40 AM
from the like-many-of-my-friends dept.
from the like-many-of-my-friends dept.
Josh Fink writes "Space.com has a very interesting article as part their weekly mystery Monday series about a new calculation that shows that the Universe is actually much older than than the 14.3 billion years old that was established in 2003. From the article, "...the universe is instead about 15.8 billion years old and about 180 billion light-years wide." The calculations were based off of a recalculation of the Hubble Constant which dictates how fast the universe is expanding, and they found it is actually 15% slower than previously thought. The findings will be printed in an upcoming edition of Astrophysical Journal."
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Backslash: More on Leopard, AOL, Reuters and the Universe 117 comments
Read on for some of the most interesting comments and exchanges on a handful of yesterday's Slashdot posts (on the age of the Universe, virtual desktops in OS X, trick photography on the Reuters wire, and AOL's latest privacy gaffe) in today's Backslash summary.
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What is... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:What is... (Score:4, Funny)
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Yea, but what's outside (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Yea, but what's outside (Score:4, Interesting)
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Re:Yea, but what's outside (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:Yea, but what's outside (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:Yea, but what's outside (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:Yea, but what's outside (Score:4, Insightful)
The metaphor I always heard was that if the Universe were 2D, it would be on the surface of a balloon. The balloon expands in 3D in such a way that everything in the Universe is growing apart from everything else, but there's no "edge".
So yeah, within that metaphor our 3D universe is expanding in 4D -- the distance between things is growing larger but it's very difficult for us to visualize the axis along which it's expanding.
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Re:Yea, but what's outside (Score:5, Informative)
Oh, and if you're curious as to an "alternate" theory, there's some mindblowing stuff here: http://www.tenthdimension.com/flash2.php [tenthdimension.com] (Warning, contains Flash for you paranoids)
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Re:Yea, but what's outside (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Yea, but what's outside (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:Yea, but what's outside (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:Yea, but what's outside (Score:4, Interesting)
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Re:Yea, but what's outside (Score:5, Insightful)
When a galaxy is receding almost at the speed of light it will appear with a large redshift. Occasionally astronomers find a galaxy that sets a redshift record, and they get all excited. If the faster-than-light galaxies appeared redshifted, they would cover the sky! The astronomers wouldn't be getting so excited. But those galaxies don't appear at all- they're outside the observable universe. The distance to them is so great that more than 300,000 km of brand new space is being shoehorned in between us and them every second. So we won't even see them redshifted because the photons never even reach us.
The huge-redshift galaxies exist just inside a thin shell around us, about 15 billion light years in radius, that defines the observable universe. The observable universe and the universe sound like the same thing but are not. Most of the universe is outside the observable part- outside the shell. If a galaxy is outside the shell, we'll never see it. If a galaxy is just inside the shell they eventually find it and it might set a new z record depending on its redshift (i.e. how close it is to the inside of the shell). In theory if they found a galaxy that straddled the shell itself it would be redshifted from microwaves down through radio all the way to infinite wavelengths. In reality you'll never see that- the furthest thing you see is the cosmic microwave background, which is still coming from 400000 light years inside the shell. Even closer to the shell, you can "see" the early universe just along the inner surface, and the early universe was more opaque- light coming from there would have to have been emitted shortly after the Big Bang, when scattering was much more efficient, so that light doesn't make it here. FYI IANAA.
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Re:Yea, but what's outside (Score:5, Interesting)
The universe is expanding away from us in all directions. Well, it's expanding at every point.
So it is possible for a photon of light which started it's life at the opposite end of the universe when the universe was much smaller then it is now, to have not yet reached us, and indeed for it to never reach us, because of the universes expansion. No matter how far it travels, we will always be out of reach, and accelerating. Note I am ignoring the concept of the big crunch here, as it's an unproven concept.
However we are not travelling faster then the speed of light, even though we stay out of reach, what's happening is that the universe in which the speed of light is a constant is itself increasing in size. Thus the distance this imaginary photon must cover to reach us keeps getting larger.
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answer (Score:5, Informative)
You take a balloon that's been partially inflated, and paint loads of evenly spaced dots all over it.
Then you further inflate the baloon. Each dot move away from each other dot at a uniform rate (well, more or less).
Universal expansion can be thought of in a similer fashion. It isn't that the edge of the universe is moving farther out, leaving just more and more space inside, it's that the 'space' between( for simplicities sake, galaxies), is increasing in size, expanding outward in every direction. Thus all the galaxies are moving away from each other in much the same way as the dots on the balloon.
Space is expanding like this everywhere, but in small uneven pockets of gravity such as clusters of galaxies, or inside a galaxy, the expansion is less obvious, because of gravity's effects.
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Re:Yea, but what's outside (Score:5, Insightful)
Just because Einstein turned Newtonian physics on its ear doesn't make Newton any less of a genius. Whenever Einstein is superceded, it won't make him less of a genious, either. It just means that someone else has stood on his shoulders, like he stood on Newton's, and has seen even further.
Newton and Einstein both "changed the Universe" because they changed how we view it and how we relate to it. Or the example Burke uses is Galileo, and how he shifted the center of the Universe from the Earth to the Sun. (I know you could argue that it was really Copernicus, and that neither was really correct.)
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Re:Yea, but what's outside (Score:5, Funny)
Need a visual? Imagine the universe just a million years after it was born, Cornish suggests. A batch of light travels for a year, covering one light-year. "At that time, the universe was about 1,000 times smaller than it is today," he said. "Thus, that one light-year has now stretched to become 1,000 light-years."
Which is one of the many reasons I consider any science that hasn't gone into producing a working television at least 95% bullshit.
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That question is meaningless (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Yea, but what's outside (Score:5, Funny)
It is probably biometrics now but who cares when there is so much to do in this universe. Infact, anyone who wants to leave this universe is clearly unpatriotic anyway.
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Re:Yea, but what's outside (Score:4, Funny)
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Re:Yea, but what's outside (Score:3, Funny)
No, but I hear there is a pretty decent restaurant at the end of the universe. Just make sure you tip the robot parking your car.
Re:Yea, but what's outside (Score:4, Funny)
The Norther Pole?
And wouldn't the 1-dimensional surface of a ball be a circle?
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15.8 billion years old? (Score:3, Funny)
Redshift in Light Constant? (Score:5, Interesting)
I am not a physicist but I recall another article [slashdot.org] that speculated that light may not always have traveled at the same speed. If this is true and we are measuring light that is ~90 billion years old, doesn't this drastically effect the red light shift that is so dependent on the constant of the speed of light?
They didn't go into detail in the article except that it is a new recalculation using a pair of stars instead of a single star. I do not believe this alleviates the problem of possible change in constants regarding light and its redshift, however.
Old (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Old (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Old (Score:4, Insightful)
In my mind, they are all mythologies (before I get flamed please go read some Joseph Campbell [amazon.com]...you'll see that there is nothing derogatory about my use of the word mythology). We all need to believe in something, and that is a choice and the strength of the choice is rooted in faith...just my two cents though.
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180B years wide but only 15B years old? (Score:5, Funny)
Ok, now I'm not an expert in astronomy... (Score:3, Interesting)
I mean, it's nice by itself and all, but I'd be highly interested whether that has any implications other than changing the universe from being old to being older than we thought.
Wow its changed again (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Wow its changed again (Score:4, Insightful)
1. Gather measurements
2. Set up hypothesis that explain measurements
3. Do more measurements
4. Find measurement that doesn't fit with hypothesis.
5. Find mistake in previously mentioned measurement or set up new hypothesis that also explains new measurements.
6. goto 3.
Take religion as a contrast:
1. Come up with a nice book/scripture/bedtimestory
2. Defend it at all cost no mather how absurd it looks/sounds and how much evidence contradicts it.
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Re:Wow its changed again (Score:4, Insightful)
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Poor Douglas (Score:3, Interesting)
Sadly, according to TFA and Wikipedia, it is now believed to be about 71. These seem so far apart that I wonder if the same units were used for both estimates.
15B years, 180B light-years... RTFA (here) (Score:5, Informative)
This article generated quite a few e-mails from readers who were perplexed or flat out could not believe the universe was just 13.7 billion years old yet 158 billion light-years wide. That suggests the speed of light has been exceeded, they argue. So SPACE.com asked Neil Cornish to explain further. Here is his response:
"The problem is that funny things happen in general relativity which appear to violate special relativity (nothing traveling faster than the speed of light and all that).
"Let's go back to Hubble's observation that distant galaxies appear to be moving away from us, and the more distant the galaxy, the faster it appears to move away. The constant of proportionality in that relationship is known as Hubble's constant.
"One seemingly paradoxical consequence of Hubble's observation is that galaxies sufficiently far away will be receding from us at a velocity faster than the speed of light. This distance is called the Hubble radius, and is commonly referred to as the horizon in analogy with a black hole horizon.
"In terms of special relativity, Hubble's law appears to be a paradox. But in general relativity we interpret the apparent recession as being due to space expanding (the old raisins in a rising fruit loaf analogy). The galaxies themselves are not moving through space (at least not very much), but the space itself is growing so they appear to be moving apart. There is nothing in special or general relativity to prevent this apparent velocity from exceeding the speed of light. No faster-than-light signals can be sent via this mechanism, and it does not lead to any paradoxes.
"Indeed, the WMAP data [on cosmic microwave background radiation] contain strong evidence that the very early universe underwent a period of accelerated expansion in which the distance been two points increased so quickly that light could not outrace the expansion so there was a true horizon -- in precise analogy with a black hole horizon. Indeed, the fluctuations we see in the CMB are thought to be generated by a process that is closely analogous to Hawking radiation from black holes.
"Even more amazing is the picture that emerges when you combine the WMAP data with [supernova] observations, which imply that the universe has started inflating again. If this is true, we have started to move away from the distant galaxies at a rate that is increasing, and in the future we will not be able to see as many galaxies as they will appear to be moving away from us faster than the speed of light (due to the expansion of space), so their light will not be able to reach us."
The 180B light years is a MINIMUM size (Score:5, Interesting)
To illustrate how big the universe could be there was, I think, an interesting article (set of articles?) in Scientific American that described the various ways in which we would could have a "parallel (viewable) universe" to our own. One was the idea that the whole universe was so huge that if you went far enough you could find an exact same configuration of all of the particles that we can see in our own viewable (~30B lyr wide) universe.
Of course this would mean that the actual universe would be so unbelievably gigantic that 180B lyr. would be an unimaginably tiny speck within it!
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15% Slower (Score:5, Funny)
Yeah well, I'm a little wider and a bit slower each year too.
Erdos joke (Score:5, Interesting)
only a 10% story (Score:3, Insightful)
The real age of the Universe discovered! (Score:5, Funny)
-dZ.
Misleading, sensational article (Score:5, Informative)
This whole article is misleading. The new research has very little to do with our knowledge of the size and age of the universe.
(And, yes, I am an astronomer).
Stanek and company have used measurements of one eclipsing binary system to determine the distance to M33. This is a good way to measure distances, as it avoids the perils of even a short "ladder" of methods. They find a distance modulus of 24.92 +/- 0.12 mag to the binary. You can read their paper on astro-ph at
http://xxx.lanl.gov/abs/astro-ph?papernum=0606279 [lanl.gov]
Go to Table 7 of their paper, in which they compare their distance to previous measurements. There are 12 previous values, measured by several techniques (only 2 of the papers use Cepheids). The range of those previous values is 24.32 +/- 0.45 to 24.86 +0.07/-0.11. Their new distance is inconsistent, at the 1-sigma level, with 6 of the 12 others; thus, it is consistent with 6 of the 12 others.
Yes, it's true that the HST Key Project distance to M33, computed using Cepheids, is smaller than the new distance by an amount well outside the quoted uncertainties. But that's not a big deal, by itself. M33 is only one of a number of galaxies which serves to calibrate secondary distance indicators, which may in turn be used to find the Hubble constant. A small change in the distance to M33, even if true, would not make any major change to H-nought.
Recall that M33 is close enough to us that its radial velocity is NOT caused by the expansion of the universe, but instead by the gravitational forces of the galaxies in the Local Group. The press release's statement
is absolute nonsense. One cannot USE the Hubble constant and radial velocity of M33 to calculate its distance. The radial velocity of M33 is -179 km/sec, so "using" the Hubble costant to determine its distance would yield a negative distance. Phht.
This is a very nice, and very very worthwhile scientific project -- I have followed the DIRECT team's efforts for years, and encourage them to keep going! -- but the press release tries too hard to make it into some sort of breakthrough with profound immediate results.
Sigh.
The Hubble Constant and the age of the universe (Score:5, Informative)
I actually used to work on a team measuring the Hubble Constant using Radio Telescope data ten years ago - actually the same group who came up with 42 km s-1 Mpc-1 value which caused all the Douglas Adams H2G2 references (that was shortly before I joined). There was a lot of controversy over the value of the Constant back then and it is still a hot topic. Back then, the Hubble Constant was thought to have values anywhere from 30 km s-1 Mpc-1 up to 120 km s-1 Mpc-1 . The smaller the value of the Hubble Constant, the older the Universe is. Having a smaller value was desirable because it meant that the Universe was old enough to account for the oldest objects observed (about 16 billion years old). Think about that.
One of the points that struck me then was that the value of the Hubble Constant measured tended to be higher when measured using "more local" techniques and tended to be lower as techniques using more distant measurements were used. The Radio Telescope information gave us measurements based on object around or beyond a redshift of 1 (or, to put it another way, these clusters of galaxies observered were about half the age of the universe when the light left them).
Anyway, we'll be seeing more measurements of the Hubble Constant for many more years. Just remember the error bars!
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
Re:The Hubble Constant and the age of the universe (Score:4, Insightful)
No, the startling thing about recent cosmological work is that we do know this number to ~percent. The flagship for this new "precision cosmology" are the WMAP [nasa.gov] results [nasa.gov]. The number is weighing in at 13.7+/-0.2 billion years. Take a look at the tables of cosmological parameters in this paper and the carefully calculated error bars.
This particular press release's sweeping claims do overreach, as nicely summarized by Michael Richmond in a post above. M33 isn't at a cosmological distance, the observations being done by this project help to understand the lower rungs of the distance ladder, from which you can figure out distances to far-off galaxies and try to calculate numbers to independently compare to the microwave background fits. These results are one of many such distance calibrations, and have to be factored in statistically with the others. On the whole, several other means of figuring out cosmological parameters (such as the Age of the Universe) agree with the WMAP results within errors. You only get TFA's 15% increase if that is the only measurement you use to calibrate distances, throwing out all the rest.
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Accuracy of the Hubble Constant measurements (Score:5, Insightful)
Chewing through that paper (interesting one by the way) shows that those error bars are based on analysis of the data after processing. Therefore, those error bars on the age of the universe are assuming that the removal of foreground sources and fluctuations due to the Sunyaev Zel'dovich effect have been done absolutely correctly. No attempt (that I can see) has been made to model the errors arising from that procedure. That alone suggests that there are systematic effects which are not accounted for in those results.
I'm extremely sceptical of a lot of error bars on a lot of data. Confusion is a huge topic in radio astronomy (and I don't mean the chaotic, running-around, headless-chicken type of confusion) and I see paper after paper that really doesn't understand it, deal with it or present any full explanation of how errors in confusion analysis would propagate into the answers.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
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Its not the size of the boat... (Score:5, Informative)
One thing people don't seem to be grasping is that with the Big Bang model, the size of the universe isn't measured by the distance between two particles floating on the "edge". It is actually a measure of the width of the "fabric" of the known universe, space-time. Its difficult to grasp this since it is not something easily perceived.
The real reason for the size of the universe being so much larger is that the laws governing the size of space-time are not the same as the laws of spacial relativaty, and therefore are not constrained to the upper bound of the speed of light.
The best analogy that I've heard is the ant on the balloon example. The idea is that you picture an ant sitting on a balloon with a bread crumb an inch away. If you were to blow up the balloon to twice its size, the bread crumb wouldn't necessarily move to a distance of two inches from the ant.
In this example, we are the ants and we are watching the galaxies, represented by the bread crumb, moving away from us. However, the fabric of existence is expanding at a much larger rate.
The "what's beyond the edge" question is essentially a pointless question when dealing with space-time. There is no "edge" because nothing can possibly exist outside of the realm of spacetime.
And if that concept doesn't satisfy the question, then a simple-minded answer would be that an "edge" can never be reached as space-time is always expanding faster than any particle could possibly hope to keep up with it.
--
"A man is asked if he is wise or not. He replies that he is otherwise" ~Mao Zedong
The other 148.4 billion light years... (Score:4, Interesting)
So, the universe is 148.4 billion light years bigger than it ought to be (if the universe expanded from a singularity at the speed of light). So, do we believe the universe is expanding at much faster than the speed of light? Was space-time warped by the explosion? And if so, how can any guess made on spectral/telemetry data be considered meaningful?
Assumptions are Bigger Than Margins of Error (Score:4, Interesting)
So far, all the answers to all the questions seem to be making the same implicit assumptions:
- Hubble's Constant is constant
- The current size of the universe is known
I'm sure there are many equally important assumptions, but these two seem to form the basis for using the inverse of H-nought (dang, I'm British, now!) to calculate the age of the universe.If Hubble's Constant is actually Carpe Web's Variable (dang, I'm important, now!), then we'd have to know all the values of CW-i (index of Carpe Web's Variable over time, formerly thought to be Hubble's Constant) and then take one mother of an integral to calculate the age of the universe. Well, if we were smart enough to know all the values of CW-i over 6,000 years -- oops, I mean 15.8 billion years -- then maybe the integral wouldn't be too difficult.
But, we'd still need to know the current size of the universe to calculate the age. What if there's a little bit more beyond what we can currently "see"? What if there's some schmutz on the lens of the Hubble telescope? What if the invisible pink elephants only look invisible but are actually blocking our "view" of the real edge of the current universe (or maybe the edge of the universe 15.8 billion years ago, which is when the light from it started on its path to us)?
Anyway, my brain hurts, but either of the assumptions seems to swamp the margins of error mentioned in this thread.
more detail (Score:4, Informative)
If you have taken a fair bit of math skip this and and go here http://pancake.uchicago.edu/~carroll/notes/ [uchicago.edu] to Chapter 8 in particular.
We want the universe on the largest of scales to look isotropic and be homogeneous spatially. The first means it looks the same in all directions about some point, and the second meaning that its physical properties are the same everywhere. If the universe is isotropic about one point and it is homogeous it follows that it is isotropic about every point. Straight away there is no priveleged center and it is meaningless to talk about the center of the Big Bang or some such. Insert standard dots on a balloon or raisn bread rising explanation here but neither is perfect.
We can look at galaxies and can see spectral lines and can measure their shifts and recognize that they must be moving with respect to us, and are typically moving away from us so the univsere is expanding. So the universe must look the same from every point in space but it is not static and can look different at different times. Because we want to maintain homogeneity and isotropy through time and because we believe there are no privleged directions or points in space we want this expansion to be solely a function of time. This function of time is what is called the scale factor and it is the fundamental quantity that determines what present distances in the universe are and how fast they are changing. There is no speed of light anywhere around the scale factor, and there isn't going to be.
With all this we can write down the model for the universe, and its called the Friedmann-Lemaitre-Robertson-Walker metric after the smart people who came up with it. Thats fancy talk for a single line that tells you how to compute the "distance" between two events each occuring at their own space and time coordinates. Its equation 8.7 in the article. If you believe we live in a flat universe which you should because theres lots of good experimental evidence for it from studying the cosmic microwave background, even that simplifies a fair bit to something that can look like ds^2 = dt^2-a^2(t)(dx^2+dy^2+dz^2).
The second section in brackets to the right of the scale factor is the way you'd compute the distance between two events in 3d space, just the sum of the squares of their differences in position, and the dt^2 is the bit that adds on time. In any local region of the universe a(t) is constant and can be taken to be one and then you have a return to happy special relativity where the speed of light is constant to all inertial observers. Take a(t) to zero and you see the singularity in the equations which we call the Big Bang. This is where the model and the equations break down and thats all we can truly say about it. The universe (hopefully) does not break down, only our model to describe it does.
This metric, which we can write happily as a diagonal matrix even can be plugged into Einsteins equations and give you yet more equations like the Friedmann equation and the acceleration equation (Carroll 8.35 and 8.36), and you can derive Hubbles law and discusses all the interesting forms of matter you can have in it including what happens in Einstein's equation has a cosmological constant term. You'll notice theres still no speed of light. Stuff in the universe cannot move faster than the speed of light according to some local observer. However, the universe is sort of the fabric on which all the stuff is and that fabric can stretch faster than the speed of light. We do see object moving faster than light. See near end for an example, more information and no serious equations http://www.astro.ucla.edu/~wright/doppler.htm [ucla.edu]
Thats become somewhat important following the studies of distant supernovae from '98 and we now know that the univer
Re:180 billion light-years wide (Score:5, Funny)
How did they figure that out
Triangulation?
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Re:Expand faster than light? (Score:3, Insightful)