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An Older, Larger Universe
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."
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think at the end of 180 billion light years you've just wrapped around to the other side, in a similar manner to travelling around the world. If there was a "border," whatever is outside that border is also part of the known universe.
Bill Clinton: Pimp we can believe in. - The Shirt!!!
If the universe is 15.8 billion years old, then shouldn't the universe be 31.6 billion light years across? Has the speed of light changed at some point?
Cosmologists have to be the weathermen of astronomy. Every five to ten years they come up with their definitive measurements of the (age,shape,nature, ending,begining pick one or more) universe. Once they have settled into an attractive basin they defend the viewpoint religously and then in five to ten years it happens all over again. If you catch a cosmologist between shifts they act as if the current viewpoint is the be all and end all.
You wouldn't be happy to find out there really is a God? :)
Execute? [Y/N] _
Just like "What came before there was time". Without a frame of reference, words like "beyond" or "before" become meaningless. You might as well ask what lies "beyond" the point you see on a cartesian plane.
I never spellcheck and I freely admit it. Save your karma for more worthwhile "lol erorrs" replies
15.8 is not "much older" than 14.3 billion years. It's only about 10% older. This is just a tweak. For a long time, astronomers disagreed about the Hubble age by a factor of two or more, and probably some still do.
Fiat Lux.
This is a common question. Spacetime is allowed to expand faster than light. It is all that moves through spacetime that is bound by the speed of light.
My question exactly. I can see the headlines: Einstein Was Wrong! :-)
/. but don't be surprised if, when time has passed a bit more, Einstein looks merely insightful and not the genius we see him as today.
Not to dick on Einstein, the man was doubtlessly much much more intelligent than myself and probably everyone else here on
A lot of fantastic minds have made great advancements (in their own time) only to be proven "kinda right" as our knowledge of the universe progresses. Newton was a God among men in his time, today his "understanding" of things falls somewhere between utterly mistaken to elementry.
Einstein's theories will hold some truth but we already know that there is much much more going on that Einstein had no real way of grasping. In time most of his theories will likely fail the real test and he will be seen as a brilliant man who just didn't have enough data to understand the really big picture properly. Who knows what he would come up with if he were alive today with the knowledge we have of the universe compared to what he had in his day.
Aye, faith and reason need be seperate. Reason is for science, it's how progress occurs...faith is for the development of a human being.
In my mind, they are all mythologies (before I get flamed please go read some Joseph Campbell...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.
What gets me going though is what is outside of those 180 billion light years of width? What happens when you hit the border?
How could you hit the border since you would need to go faster than light to hit it? (right?)
You just got troll'd!
Chaos Theory doesn't preclude the universe from being deterministic (Quantum Theory maybe, but not Chaos Theory). But without all of the initial states of the particles, and a complete understanding of how they interact, predicting long-term outcomes with any sort of certainty is out of the question. Chaos Theory doesn't mean that the universe is random, just that predicting a future macroscopic state requires consideration of even microscopic particles.
What is potentially troubling with this, and why I am skeptical of the implications for the Hubble constant, is that the age of the Universe had been narrowed down with a decimal point to 13.7 billion years, which means that the uncertainty in that number is +-100 million years or so. This is completely outside of the error bars. And the previous number had been honed in upon by not just the WMAP microwave background probe, but by many independent observations of Type Ia supernovae. It seems more likely to me that there is a systematic effect affecting the brightness of this binary star system observed in another galaxy than a confounding problem with WMAP or Type Ia. Also, it's a little odd to me to make Hubble constant inferences from a galaxy in our Local Group --- a galaxy that, together with Andromeda, is gravitationally bound to us (moving towards us) and doesn't obey the Hubble flow.
This, while a "funny" post, is also quite insightful. The problem with any of these figures is that we are really pulling them out of our nether regions. Given the supposed size and complexity of our universe (which doesn't seem to be getting any smaller or more simple), we will likely never know the actual age or size of the universe. If you were able to travel at insanely fast speeds, or use some form of long-distance teleportation, and you reached the "edge" of the universe, what would lie beyond? Empty space? How do we know the universe is not of infinite dimensional characteristics? We don't have nearly enough data to even justify a measurement.
Of course, by declaring the figures to be new and improved, some hooligan gets a microdot of attention for a while, so I guess that's what we are really looking for. We need to feel important, and like we're accomplishing something. Meanwhile, TV technology could be moving forward to something beyond digital, into the realm of beautiful analog freedom. I jest somewhat, but there is something to be said for the results of focused energy (in the form of thought). We improve our digital processes so that they become more effective than the current analog standards. However, we often do so at the expense of advances in other areas (analog, rottedlog, and ants-on-a-log technologies).
The age of the universe is all fine and dandy to want to know about, but really, would it break anybody's heart if it were 6,000 years and 3 days old? What about if it were only 10 million years old? 5 billion? Just as I think many Christians waste their time worrying about what someone else thinks about the age of the earth, many scientists do the same. Considering that most of us will likely be dead within 130 years, anything 6,000 years and older is a long time. And all of the above measurements are probably incorrect. Trying to pin it down with such limited amounts of data is pointless.
The brains of a chicken, coupled with the claws of two eagles, may well hatch the eggs of our destruction.
Here's an example of "moving faster than light" that you can do at home. Take a laser pointer and a ball and point the laser directly towards the center of the ball. You get a point of light on the surface. Now rotate the laser pointer until the beam is just tangent to the ball, so that point slides along the ball's surface and then jumps off of it. If you rotate at a constant velocity, you can prove using calculus that the velocity of the point of light on the ball's surface goes to infinity as the beam becomes tangent.
How is this possible? Simply because the point of light is not a physical object. So there is no relativity violation here.
...following the principles of Heisenburger's Uncertain Cat...
Your right...Give it another few years and I promise you another 3 billion years will be tacked on with more guesstimate bullsh*t.
"One day your going to wake up and realize that your not as witty as you think you are." -Me.
"faith and reason need be seperate" Why? I'm not one of those people who say that we should ignore science if it doesn't agree with religion, but that doesn't mean that science can't prove something that you believe through faith. If what you believe is true, then science should be able to back it up. Maybe not now, but possibly in the future with better technology. A lot of the scientific advances made during the renaissance were made by people who had a belief about how the world was organized based on their religion and set about trying to prove it using science. I personally think that is the problem with both camps today. The religious side wants to hobble science because it might contradict their faith. The secular side often discards or ignores certain avenues of science because it might validate something the religious side believes and give credence to other beliefs that may be more irrational. Both sides are censoring science in the name of truth.
For a list of all the ways technology has failed to improve the quality of life, please press three. -- Alice Kahn
They claim this is more accurate by using data that they say is even older than they originally thought... Let's see.. "The team's results suggested that the stars were about 3 million light-years from Earth--or about half-a-million light-years farther than would be expected using the commonly accepted Hubble constant value." (from the article)... So there's a half million MORE years of time before that light even gets to us, and somehow that makes their data more accurate TODAY - it's 1/2 Million years OLDER data... that's more accurate... Even IF it winds up being "proven" true (and scientists still argue about the speed of light as constant and whether graivational forces can effect light (which we KNOW you CAN "bend" a light beam with energy and graviational forces - been proven in the labs) - thus it's speed) it doesn't prove anything about the age of the galaxy or width of it. We don't know if anything's slowed that light down (we do know as intensity tapers off the light beam loses energy and thus "slows" down - again, raging debate in science over this; as it's proven and disproven back and forth more times than a yo-yo bouncing up and down to/from a kid's hand). "The researchers reached their surprising conclusion after using a new method they invented to calculate intergalactic distances, one that they say is more precise and requires fewer steps than standard techniques." So they didn't like the old way, it didn't say what they wanted it to - and it couldn't be used to help them... And the whole "Dark Energy" thing seems shaky at best. "Astronomers have known since the 1920s that the universe is expanding. In 1998 they were astounded to learn that it is expanding at an ever-increasing pace. The universe is accelerating, in other words. Nobody has a clue what's up, so smart minds invoke a thing dubbed dark energy to explain why gravity appears to have turned into a repulsive force. They say this dark energy makes up 73 to 75 percent of the mass-energy budget of the cosmos. 'It's the equivalent of us not knowing what water is,' as Livio puts it, 'even though it covers 70 percent of the Earth.' " Key words here... "Nobody has a clue what's up, so the 'smart minds' (my emphasis) invoked (aka: created) a thing dubbed dark energy..." So let's see... We think the galaxy is getting wider and wider faster and faster every day... We don't know why or how... So we'll just say that this force is causing it and to keep it sounding scientifically sound and reasonable give it a good name like "dark energy"... And THIS is what these other guys made a new method of calculation to measure distance of stars from Earth so they could account for and measure? Why bother trying to measure something that scientists readily admit to just creating because they didn't understand what was going on?
-- "You must be the change you desire to see in the world." Mahatma Gandhi --
Are you saying that you would view Newton as "merely insightful" rather than a "genius"? History will remember Einstein as the genius he was.
Stating that the age of the universe is 15.8 billion years old gives the impression that this is accurate to around 1 percent or better. The error bars on this sort of figure are probably closer to +/- 2 billion years or more, implying that the 99% percentile answer is something in the range 12 - 20 billion years.
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 results. 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.
Some time read, "The Day The Universe Changed," by James Burke. http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0316117048/002-07 01003-8544823?v=glance&n=283155 or http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Day_the_Universe_ Changed
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.)
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
Exactly. It's creating it as it goes... Mindboggling, isn't it? Now that's it but just on theory... other theories that I'm not so familiar with (and at an absolute amateurish level) speculate about expansion over some other spatial coordinates that the 3D we know of. Imagine acid over a polystirene cone, eating it at a symetric rate (or perhaps not so much)... Our universe would be just this surface expanding, and it expands its borders over another spatial dimention unthinkable to the flat universe dudes (us).
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.
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
Anything I post is strictly my own thoughts and doesn't necessarily have anything to do with the opinions of IBM.
Or...you can simply believe in Intelligent Design, and then not have to worry about coming up with ways of justifying the view of your existence that you already have.
Okay...there goes my positive karma for the day...
Man is the lowest-cost, 150-pound, nonlinear, all-purpose computer system which can be mass-produced by unskilled labor.
Space is stretching out between the matter. There are galaxies receding faster than light, but you'll never be able to observe them in any sort of experiment, or measure their speed, so there is no problem. The only reason we know they exist is from inferring their existence, and it's a different kind of existence, one that can never be proven by direct observation and measurement. It's like the singularity of a black hole- you can infer it's in there, but you can't observe anything inside the event horizon in an experiment anyway, so it doesn't upset theory.
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.
I don't want to get flamed by saying people are asking dumb questions
... with the theory of relativit
That is faaar from a dumb question. You are just a human and AFAIK there is no agreement between the scientists about the beginning of the Universe. If I recall correctly it is widely believed by more than 1 500 000 000 people that the Universe began about 5600 years ago, so why should we listen to you? Show us some calculations, or links to them...
, but everyone just needs to stop relying on simple arithmetic when dealing with the size of space... The concepts involved are far more complicated than that.
Sure. It is an interesting question nevertheless.
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.
Size IS the distance between two particles floating on the edge. Measure, width and space-time are mathematical consepts that are used to describe stuff, nothing more. It is not something you percieve, either you try understand and use, or you don't. You can make analogies to understand it, but in the end it is a mathematical idea that seems to show how stuff works, not what stuff is.
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.
SpEcial relativity is a theory, the laws you refer are more like principles. Nothing in the universe can travel faster than the light and that is the end of the whole story. If you accept Big Bang and you believe that there is an ultimate speed, then you believe that the Universe is not larger than the time that has passed x light speed x 2. If you think that the speed of light varied, then ok, you will integrate the function of speed over time. Moreover, the time can be different for different observers, so you might need to change the time to a variable. Even then the universe is still bound to the speed of light. That is what we know for now. The laws are the same! If they are not, we don't know anything.
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.
This analogy shows how difficult is to think of a good one. The analogy shows how it should look from the outside, except there is no outside. The baloon example shows that there is no "center" of the universe, not what you're proposing that it expands in a magical way noone has seen. Well, maybe it is doing just that - if you apply Einstein's cosmological constant lambda, but that is still just hypothesis.
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.
First, you define "exist" as in "it exists in space-time". Then, you say nothing exists outside. Well, duh. That is the whole point of the Universe - that everything is IN it.
If you have a particle that is faster than the speed of light, then essentially it is not in our universe, because we could not feel its presence - it should not emit a gravitational field, because the time between two peaks of the wave should be a little more than infinity, it must in some way travel backwards in time, well
Would that not cause problems at the level of the very small? Can, for instance, a quark shrink and still be a quark?
If matter were shrinking, that means atoms would have to shrink too, or run out of room.
If, rather, matter remained a constant 'size', then relative to the size of the universe they would be shrinking as the universe expanded, but no reduction of actual size would take place, just relative size