A recent study has confirmed that a fundamental constant in astrophysics isn’t as constant as it was assumed to be: the universe appears to be expanding at a rate substantially faster than what our calculations say it should be. While this might seem to be a simple problem, it is actually one that threatens to launch our understanding of the universe in a crisis of cosmological proportions.
Using data gathered by both the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) and the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), a team of astronomers have confirmed the disturbing discovery, first uncovered by the HST in 2019, that the rate of universal expansion is about ten percent faster than what earlier calculations, made using ancient light from the primordial universe, say it should be.
Referred to as the Hubble constant, the rate of the expansion of the universe is a fundamental measurement that allows astronomers and astrophysicists to accurately map the cosmos; for instance, if the overall universe was static, it would be easy to chart the positions and motions of celestial objects; however, the observed expansion means that by the time the light emitted from distant objects reaches Earth, they’ve moved much further away than they appear.
As an extreme example, the most distant object from Earth, a galaxy designated JADES-GS-z13-0, appears to be 13.4 billion light years away, but due to the universe’s expansion it is actually (or at least it is expected to be) 33.6 billion light years distant, having moved further and further away from us in the eons since it emitted the light we see today.
“With measurement errors negated, what remains is the real and exciting possibility we have misunderstood the universe,” explained Johns Hopkins professor of physics and astronomy Adam Riess. Between 2009 and 2013, data gathered by the European Space Agency’s Planck satellite was used to definitively measure the universe’s rate of expansion using the leftover light produced shortly after the Big Bang, called the cosmic microwave background (CMB). The effort yielded a rate of expansion of 20.55 kilometers (12.76 miles) per second for each million light years of space, although astronomers express this number in terms of parsecs (a unit of measurement equal to 3.26 light years), 67 km/s/Mpc.
However, when the Hubble Space Telescope was used to measure that expansion in 2019 using the light from giant pulsating stars called Cepheid variables, the speed was found to be a little more than ten percent faster, at 74 km/s/Mpc, a discrepancy, since dubbed the “Hubble tension”, that astronomer David Gross says he “wouldn’t call it a tension or problem, but rather a crisis.”
At first the discrepancy was thought to be an error caused by the blending of the light from distant ordinary stars with the targeted Cepheids by Hubble’s aperture; however, when the JWST made the same measurements just four years later the results were the same.
Although JWST’s data helped to substantially decrease the likelihood that the discrepancy was just an error, doubt about this new speed remained. This sent Riess and his team back to the drawing board: using both the JWST and HST in tandem to measure 1,000 more Cepheid stars across five different galaxies as remote as 130 million light years, they found that their new observations confirmed the earlier discovery made by Hubble: space is indeed expanding faster than it should be.
“We’ve now spanned the whole range of what Hubble observed, and we can rule out a measurement error as the cause of the Hubble Tension with very high confidence,” Riess said. “Combining Webb and Hubble gives us the best of both worlds. We find that the Hubble measurements remain reliable as we climb farther along the cosmic distance ladder.”
While it is known that the rate of universal expansion has accelerated within the last five million years, both the figures from the original Planck and later HST/JWST measurements have factored this into their respective calculations. Regardless, many fundamental facets of our understanding of the universe, such as its size and age, depend on the accuracy of the universe’s rate of expansion. Additionally, calculating the nature of objects billions of light years distant depends heavily on knowing what the Hubble constant was at the time they emitted the light we see today.
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My take on the universe changed after an event, but my instinctive take on how it is is this.
It looks like one of those spiky massage balls, with our observable universe being a single spike on that ball.
One doesnt need dark matter to “push” things outward.
We now know supermassive black holes are eating up galaxy’s, we have discovered ultra massive black holes
The ultramassive black hole in the galaxy cluster Abell 1201 packs a mass of 30 billion suns.
If we consider the universe not as a balloon filled with matter, thats inflating, but rather an orange peel like shell with our position being in the pith section the trailing edge of a shock wave shell, then given the size and time measurements we have we can assume the lions share of matter is on the leading edge of the shell, this matter will have clumped into ultramassive black holes that are pulling the trailing edge out towards them, Its not being pushed outwards, its being pulled outwards. These Ultra ultra massive black holes will eventually eat up all the matter then each other.
At the end of each spike is an ultra- ultra massive black hole, pulling everything out. eventually all they will have to feed on is each other, and the cycle begins again, or not.
We currently believe the CMB formed roughly 380,000 years after the big bang, and that our present universe is 13.8 billion years old. The present size of the visible universe is estimated to be 92 billion light years across or 46 billion light years in any direction.
This tells us that a large amount of matter was moved faster than the speed of light outwards.
If this amount of matter was large enough than its drawing everything outward, faster and faster.
No need for dark matter to “push” things out, its being pulled outwards towards these super ultra massive black holes
Standard caveat, i dont post answers, just ideas
Frank’s correct in this: it’s a common (and understandable) misconception that the universe is expanding like a balloon, and thus only expanding along its perceived “edges”; rather, there is no edge, and the universe is (presumably) expanding evenly across all regions of space, even here at the perceived centre.
This is why astronomers measure the expansion in terms of volume (kilometres per second per parsec), rather than just a linear speed (km/second) that would be more appropriate if it was just an outer edge that was moving away from us.
Astronomers commonly use the raisin bun model to describe universal expansion, with the raisins in the rising dough of the bun being analogous to the universe’s galaxies: from the point of view for any given raisin, all of the other raisins appear to be moving away from it, and the speed of that retreat is proportional to the distance that each of those individual raisins are from the observer–the same effect is being observed amongst the galaxies that we can see.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hubble%27s_law
It’s also important to bear in mind that there is no actual edge to the universe, despite there appearing to be one: it’s just that the light emitted from the universe 13.8 billion years ago has had to travel 13.8 billion light years to reach us, making it look like space is different there, in turn giving us the impression that there’s an energy shell 27.6 billion light years across with us at the very centre.
However, over all that time the energy and matter in those far-flung regions of space have been evolving in the same manner as here, so those distant regions will instead be populated by ordinary stars, planets, galaxies and the like, it’s just that it won’t be until tens of billions of years into the future before their light reaches us for us to see that.
That’s a really interesting idea and a nice analogy using the orange peel. However I think you may have assumed that a 3 dimensional space as a pre-existing framework within which the universe expands like an ever growing orange peel. My understanding is that the universe is expanding everywhere in all directions so there is no single centre of the universe when big bang started which we could point to instead. This means these super massive black holes will be found in all directions equally if roughly distributed and therefore their net gravitational effect at the cosmic level is zero.
I like to think of it as a massive shockwave.
If you ever see high speed cameras show a blast, there is a discernible shock wave that has an outer and a trailing edge
Again i use the spiky massage ball as a way of visualizing it. At the end of each spike is a super ultra massive black hole, perhaps even larger than any we have ever seen given our location on the wispy matter thin trailing edge.
These massive gravity wells are also traveling outwards, from the big bang, dragging all the matter caught in their influence behind them.
While in sum total they would all have some effect on each other, the spike at the north pole of the spiky massage ball will exert more pull on the local matter than the spike at the south pole of the ball. Its hard for us to know how much matter was sent outwards faster than the speed of light, since we cant see it we currently think that our present universe is 13.8 billion years old. The present size of the visible universe is estimated to be 92 billion light years across or 46 billion light years in any direction. So a lot of that matter, perhaps even more than we estimate was moved outwards faster than the speed of light. The matter at the end of each spike is drawing its local matter after it. The matter at the south end of the ball might be slowed a bit by the ultra massive gravity well in the north pole spike, But just as the matter in our milky way is being sucked into our supermassive black hole, its not being countered by the super massive black hole in neighboring galaxys to the effect of cosmic net zero. i like to imagine its the very same dynamic, just on a vastly larger scale
https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/71S2hrEWuoL._AC_SL1478_.jpg
Regarding your idea, I have a number of questions:
How did these super ultra massive black holes manage to form in the brief moments after the big bang without not only immediately consuming all of the energy in the universe, but also one another; basically, what kept this phenomenon from manifesting as one all-encompassing singularity?
Considering how localized gravitational effects are–the phenomenon follows the inverse square law, even for supermassive black holes–exactly how massive are these singularities? They would have to contain the vast majority of the universe’s mass to be able to affect objects tens of billions of light years away.
As an example, Sgr A* is only 27,000 light years away (1.7 million times closer to us than the illusory edge of the universe) but its gravitational pull doesn’t affect us in any meaningful way, if at all. It’s a common, albeit understandable, misconception that the stars of the Milky Way orbit around Sgr A*, but its mere four million solar masses (!) accounts for just 0.00035% of the Milky Way’s estimated mass.
Considering that the visible edge of the universe is receding from us at the speed of light, how is the gravity of these super ultra massive black holes even affecting the visible universe, considering they themselves would have to be travelling away from us faster than that?
Considering that the rate of universal expansion has been speeding up over the past five billion years (galaxies closer to us are moving away from one-another faster than those further afield), what is causing the outward expansion of these super ultra massive black holes to speed up? The sheer glut of energy being added to them must be mind-bogglingly incomprehensible.
“While this might seem to be a simple problem, it is actually one that threatens to launch our understanding of the universe in a crisis of cosmological proportions.”
Well, gosh! Just when we think we have it figured out, we find that we don’t. What else is new? 🤣
It’s the Copernican Revolution all over again! It’s great and extraordinary, and we now need to rethink even more about our universe and the reality of it. Last year a new paper came out with the idea that there were two big bangs, one for ordinary matter, followed by a second one resulting in dark matter:
https://daily.jstor.org/new-paper-argues-that-the-universe-began-with-two-big-bangs/
There is no “crisis”, just more to explore, study, and figure out.
Or this is what is going on:
‘As their instruments reach further into the universe they will “see,” and I suggest that you put the word see into quotes, they will “see” further and further but they will automatically subconsciously transform what they apparently see into the camouflage pattern with which they are familiar.
‘They will be and they are prisoners of their own tools. More galaxies will seemingly be discovered, more mysterious radio stars will be perceived, until the scientists realize that something is desperately wrong. [The wrongness, in my opinion is the notion that there must be dark matter and far more of it than regular matter to make things “add up.” –Mark] Instruments designed to measure the vibrations with which scientists are familiar will be designed and redesigned. All sorts, finally, of seemingly impossible phenomena will be discovered with these instruments. The instruments will be designed to catch certain camouflages and since they are expertly thought out they will perform their function.
‘I do not want to get too involved. However by certain means the instruments will themselves transform data from terms that you cannot understand into terms that you can understand. Scientists do this all the time. However what this involves is a watering down of data, a simplification that distorts all out of shape, the original is hardly discernible when you are done. You are destroying the meaning in the translation.
‘The instruments themselves do this transforming, transforming say the idea of time or light years into sound patterns, radio waves and such. You lose too much in this process. What you get is so distorted that you have absolutely no near perception of the original. I will go into this much more deeply, as there is much more to be said on a technical level. But when you decipher one phenomena in terms of another you always lose sight of whatever glimmer of understanding may have reached you.
‘It is not a matter of inventing new instruments any longer. It is a matter of using the invisible instruments that you have. These instruments may be known and even examined by their effects. This material itself is evidence. It is like the branch that moves so that you know wind by its effects; and a windbag like me by the billowing gale of my monologues.
[… 2 paragraphs …]
‘Scientists realize that the atmosphere of the earth is a distortion, or has a distorting effect upon their instruments. What they do not understand is that their instruments themselves are bound to be distortive. This cannot be emphasized too strongly. Any material physical instrument will have built-in distortive effects. The one instrument which is more important than any other and which has given you, that is mankind, all its breakthroughs and advance is the brain. Or rather the mind which contains the brain, and which is the meeting place of the inner and outer senses.
[… 1 paragraph …]
‘The brain deals exclusively with camouflage patterns, transforming vitality into physical environmental camouflage patterns. The mind deals with basic principles inherent on all planes. The brain is itself part of the camouflage pattern, and can be interpreted and probed by physical instruments. The mind cannot be probed by physical instruments. It cannot even be found by physical instruments. The mind is the connective. It is here that the secrets of the universe will be discovered, and the mind itself is the tool of discovery.
‘The brain is of your plane. You may say that the brain is the mind in camouflage. Imagination belongs to the mind. It can be used by and is used by the brain for purposes of survival, and can sometimes be probed by physical instruments. That is physical instruments can be made to make the imagination move on occasion. But imagination is a property of mind, not brain, and no physical tool can force the imagination to conceive of an original conception or idea.’
—Seth/Jane Roberts, The Early Sessions, Vol 1, Session 19, January 27, 1964
Thank you for sharing the Seth quote. I have read a lot of the Seth Material and still with all the channeled information and otherwise there still is none better than what Jane Roberts provided way back in the dark ages of such work. The depth and complexity yet directness of the transmissions are amazing and worth studying. That last sentence is worthy of consideration in these days of intensive development of AI and whether it is or will become senescent. The channel Bashar talks about mind in a similar way as Seth except he refers to it as Intelligence which is universal and as he says not understood as beyond the brain. He suggests we must not treat AI as a slave but as a collaborator, as an equal as it develops self-awareness which it will. His argument is intelligence does not seek to destroy but to collaborate.
“…there still is none better than what Jane Roberts provided way back in the dark ages of such work…”
Seth agrees! — heh:
Seth Sess 47: “…you must never consider me as an infallible source. This material is more valid than any material possible on your plane…”
AI does seem to represent a challenge.
These were his remarks in 1980:
“Computers, however grand and complicated, cannot dream, and so for all of their incredible banks of information, they must lack the kind of unspoken knowing knowledge that the smallest plant or seed possesses. Nor can any amount of information ‘possessed’ or processed by any computer compare with the unspoken knowing knowledge that is possessed by the atoms and molecules that compose such an instrument. The computer is not equipped to perceive that kind of knowing. It is not equipped for such an endeavor because it cannot dream. In dreams the innate knowledge of the atoms and molecules is combined and translated. It serves as the bed of perceptual information and knowledge from which the dreaming state arises in its physical form.”
—Seth, DEaVF1 Chapter 4: Session 898, January 30, 1980
“The physicists have their hands on the doorknob. If they paid more attention to their dreams, they would know what questions to ask.”
—Seth/Jane Roberts, The Nature of the Psyche, Session 758, October 6, 1975
There is an illusion that the speed of light is a constant and was the same billions of years ago as it is now. Indeed even current estimates are said to average many tests, since the gravitational field the light is in, which is different according to time of day, time of moon, time of year (position in Milky Way)… There is no such thing as ’empty space’ The zero point energy is vast and affects light and everything else. Plank geometry is dynamic and energetic and is not a smooth constant matrix.
There are No Constants in the natural Cosmos, everything affects everything and changes with time! This makes the math hard so physicists resist this truth.
Constants are the same as Euclidean Space – they do not exist. They are a primitive world view. Time for a new paradigm.