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Universe not expanding as fast as it is was thought

April 12, 2015 By Kyle Mills Leave a Comment

Scientists believed that the universe is expanding at a faster because of the dark energy, but the recent study has suggested that the universe is not expanding as fast as it was believed but at a lower rate, this indicates that there is less dark energy in the universe.

Astronomers at the University of Arizona have studied on this subject and this has raised many questions like how fast is the universe accelerating after the Big Bang, which occurred around 14 billion years ago.

They have collected the data using NASA Swift satellite.

They have discovered that the type of supernova which is used to measure reliable distances in the universe fell into different populations previously unknown.

The amount of light absorbed by the la supernova varied more than previously thought.

Researchers said that the findings are analogous to sampling of 100 watt light bulbs at the hardware store and discovering that they vary in brightness.

Peter A Milne, who led the team at UA said, “We found that the differences are not random, but lead to separating Ia supernovae into two groups, where the group that is in the minority near us are in the majority at large distances – and thus when the universe was younger.

There are different [red and blue] populations out there, and they have not been recognized. The big assumption has been that as you go from near to far, type Ia supernovae are the same. That doesn’t appear to be the case.”

Milne has observed la supernova in visible and ultraviolet light and combined the data with the data from Hubble telescope and Swift satellite.

Milne said, “The idea behind this reasoning is that type Ia supernovae happen to be the same brightness – they all end up pretty similar when they explode. Once people knew why, they started using them as mileposts for the far side of the universe. The faraway supernovae should be like the ones nearby because they look like them, but because they’re fainter than expected, it led people to conclude they’re farther away than expected, and this in turn has led to the conclusion that the universe is expanding faster than it did in the past.”

He said, that the data they obtained said there might be less dark energy. Before the two populations were treated as the same population.

The research couldn’t pinpoint what such results mean for the current measure of dark energy which is 73 percent of the universe.

Universe is not expanding as fast as it was previously thought

April 11, 2015 By Dave Smith 13 Comments

According to a team of astronomers acceleration of the expansion of the universe is not as fast as they previously believed.

A team led by the University of Arizona found that certain types of the exploding stars or supernova are more diverse than they previously believed and this findings has led them to big cosmological questions, such as how fast is the universe expanding since the Big Bang.

Researchers found that type Ia supernova, which have been considered so uniform that cosmologists have used them as cosmic beacons to plumb the depths of the universe, actually fall into different populations.

The findings are similar to sampling 100-watt electric bulb and finding out that their brightness varies.

Peter A. Milne of the University of Arizona said, “We found that the differences are not random, but lead to separating Ia supernovae into two groups, where the group that is in the minority near us are in the majority at large distances — and thus when the universe was younger, there are different populations out there, and they have not been recognized. The big assumption has been that as you go from near to far, type Ia supernovae are the same. That doesn’t appear to be the case.”
The discovery throws new light on the currently accepted view of the universe expanding at a faster and faster rate pulled apart by an unknown force called dark energy this observation resulted in 2011 Nobel Prize for Physics.

Milne said, “The idea behind this reasoning, is that type Ia supernovae happen to be the same brightness — they all end up pretty similar when they explode. Once people knew why, they started using them as mileposts for the far side of the universe. The faraway supernovae should be like the ones nearby because they look like them, but because they’re fainter than expected, it led people to conclude they’re farther away than expected, and this in turn has led to the conclusion that the universe is expanding faster than it did in the past.”

The authors said that the acceleration of the universe can be explained by color difference between the two groups of supernova, leaving less acceleration than previously reported and hence this will require less dark energy than assumed.

Milne said, “We’re proposing that our data suggest there might be less dark energy than textbook knowledge, but we can’t put a number on it, until our paper, the two populations of supernovae were treated as the same population. To get that final answer, you need to do all that work again, separately for the red and for the blue population.

LHC is now ready to discover dark matter particle

March 21, 2015 By Kyle Mills

Now it’s time to reboot the world largest particle collider LHC for a new set of experiments. By the end of the march it is going to be restated by an international team of physicists.

The new experiment is to find out what is dark matter.

It was the Hubble telescope which for the first time discovered dark matter and dark energy. It further enlightened that noticeable matter is just 5 percent of the universe and 70 percent of the universe is dark energy and the remaining 25 percent is dark matter.

What is dark matter? This is the stuff that pulls gravitationally on matter around it, it is invisible because it does not interact with light and this makes it hard to detect.

The scientist has never come across a particle which exhibits such properties, and they are eagerly waiting that they could find the particle responsible for dark matter from the debris of the LHC collision.

What is LHC? LHC stands for Large Hadron Collider which is in Geneva. It is the most powerful particle accelerator in the world which is built by CERN or the European Organization for Nuclear Research.

This machine has long, oval shape tunnel where the subatomic particles like the protons, neutrons move at the speed of light. These two beams of particles are pointed against each other so that they can make a head on collision. This collision generates hot cloud of debris reaching temperatures which is 1,000,000 times hotter than the center of the sun and this debris may contain some never seen particles.

Back in 2008, just nine days into its first run of experiments, there was a significant incident at the Large Hadron Collider which has damaged some parts of it and was sent for repair.

After the collider coped, on July 4th 2012, there was another experiment performed at the LHC. There were two experiments conducted one at LHC and other at CMS and ATLAS. The result of the experiment was the biggest findings ever. They discovered a new invisible particle called the Higgs Boson. This is the particle which gives mass to everything and holds the universe together.

The LHC was shut down for maintenance and after two years, now the scientists are going to conduct a new experiment.

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