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New Study Shows Universe Still Expanding On Schedule

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."

3 of 173 comments (clear)

  1. Obligatory Spelling Comment by ixnaay · · Score: 5, Funny

    Not to be pedantic, but that is an impressive way to misspell 'messureents'.

  2. Re:8 year old's question by kheldan · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Correction: There is no space and time that we can determine with any certainty outside our physical universe.

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    Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
  3. Re:8 year old's question by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    Unless you have a generic curiosity, don't try to hard to read that, as it is not related to the universe's expansion. The grandparent was just being random or joking. A Hilbert space is just what you get when you treat the set of all continuous functions as a vector space. It has several different possible basis sets of functions you can add up to make any other function, e.g. sine waves via Fourier analysis. Instead of having unit vectors like x, y, and z, you would have unit vectors like sin(x), sin(2x), sin(3x), etc. (which makes it infinite dimensional). The concept is really important to physics, especially quantum mechanics and any where else things like Fourier analysis would be done with some mathematical rigor. But it is not what the universe is expanding into.

    The typical analogy used for what the universe is expanding into is like a balloon being inflated, with that being a 2D universe on the surface of the balloon. You could ask about the third dimension it is expanding into, but that is not really relevant (at the moment at least). The only thing that really matters is the curvature of local space (how non-flat any given spot on the balloon is). Short of discovering some new theories unlike what we've seen before or something like brane theory, the equivalent of the 3D dimension in the balloon analogy would be unreachable and meaningless, as it would not be able to affect things in anyway beyond the curvature of the surface.