{"id":76499,"date":"2018-03-03T16:22:42","date_gmt":"2018-03-04T00:22:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2018\/03\/researchers-devise-a-new-way-to-solve-long-standing-mystery-about-the-universe"},"modified":"2018-03-06T15:04:20","modified_gmt":"2018-03-06T23:04:20","slug":"researchers-devise-a-new-way-to-solve-long-standing-mystery-about-the-universe","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2018\/03\/researchers-devise-a-new-way-to-solve-long-standing-mystery-about-the-universe","title":{"rendered":"Researchers Devise a New Way to Solve Long-Standing Mystery About the Universe"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/a><\/p>\n

We know that the universe is expanding, but a strange discrepancy in just how fast that expansion is occurring continues to confound physicists\u2014and make them wonder whether there\u2019s some new, unexplained physics afoot.<\/p>\n

For every 3.3 million light years, or one megaparsec, the universe expands around <\/em>another 70 kilometers per second faster. There are two discrepant measurements of this so-called \u201cHubble constant.\u201d The light from the most distant parts of the universe reveals an expansion of 68 km\/s per megaparsec, while a method taken from extrapolating data from nearby sources reveals a rate of 73 km\/s per megaparsec. Scientists can\u2019t explain this discrepancy by chance alone, which means they\u2019re leaving something out, either in their experiments or in the laws of physics. A team of researchers have an idea for another measurement that could help close the gap between these numbers\u2014by measuring how gravity affects the light from distant supernovae.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf you want to tell the difference between new physics and unknown errors, you need another measurement,\u201d study author Thomas Collett from the University of Portsmouth in the UK told Gizmodo. \u201cIf you have measurements that have completely independent methods and they\u2019re all pointing in the same direction, you can robustly believe it\u2019s new physics, not that they\u2019re screwing up in the same way.\u201d<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

We know that the universe is expanding, but a strange discrepancy in just how fast that expansion is occurring continues to confound physicists\u2014and make them wonder whether there\u2019s some new, unexplained physics afoot. For every 3.3 million light years, or one megaparsec, the universe expands around another 70 kilometers per second faster. There are two [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":396,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[33,219],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-76499","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cosmology","category-physics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/76499","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/396"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=76499"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/76499\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":76588,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/76499\/revisions\/76588"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=76499"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=76499"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=76499"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}