New Study Shows Universe Still Expanding On Schedule 173
The Bad Astronomer writes "A century ago, astronomers (including Edwin Hubble) discovered the Universe was expanding. Using the same methods — but this time with observations from an orbiting infrared space telescope — a new study confirms this expansion, and nails the rate with higher precision than done before. If you're curious, the expansion rate found was 74.3 +/- 2.1 kilometers per second per megaparsec — almost precisely in line with previous measurements."
Re:8 year old's question (Score:4, Interesting)
The universe could be a compact manifold, in which case it isn't expanding into anything. That would fit with the essential notion that it is space itself that is expanding.
Re:Units (Score:5, Interesting)
Interestingly, some back of the envelope calculations (using rough numbers ... 300000km/s for c, 75km/s/mpc for Hubble's Constant, and 3.25 ly/pc) gives a value of roughly 13 billion light years for the recession velocity to approach c. 13 billion years is also *ROUGHLY* the age of the visible universe.
Re:Units (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Units (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Units Space FTL, but information thru space? (Score:4, Interesting)
Something I've been wondering about, but never knew quite where to ask. (Maybe this isn't the place either, but I'll give it a shot.)
i understand (or at least parse the semantic meaning) that the speed of light through space is fixed, and space can expand fasterthan that. Normally, it seems that the speed of information transmission is also tied to the speed of light, mainly I presume, because paradoxes would arise if it weren't. But can information travel across space at an effective speed uninfluenced by the expansion of space without causing paradoxes? Is it possible that information could still reach us even if light could not?