Astronomers measure universe expansion, get hints of 'new physics' (Update) January 26, 2017 Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! International astronomers using the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope have made an independent measurement of how fast the Universe is expanding. The newly measured expansion rate for the local Universe is consistent with earlier findings. These are, however, in intriguing disagreement with measurements of the early Universe. Credit: NASA, ESA, Suyu (Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics), Auger (University of Cambridge) Astronomers have just made a new measurement of the Hubble Constant, the rate at which the universe is expanding, and it doesn't quite line up with a different estimate of the same number. That discrepancy could hint at "new physics" beyond the standard model of cosmology, according to the team, which includes physicists from the University of California, Davis, that made the observation. The Hubble Constant allows astronomers to measure the scale and age of the universe and measure the distance to the most remote objects we can see, said Chris Fassnacht, a physics professor at UC Davis and a member of the international H0LiCOW collaboration which carried out the work. Read more at: https://phys.org/news/2017-01-cosmic-lenses-universe-expansion.html#jCp
One of the papers on this subject: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1607.00017v2.pdf H0LiCOW I. H0 Lenses in COSMOGRAIL’s Wellspring: Program Overview ABSTRACT Strong gravitational lens systems with time delays between the multiple images allow measurements of time-delay distances, which are primarily sensitive to the Hubble constant that is key to probing dark energy, neutrino physics, and the spatial curvature of the Universe, as well as discovering new physics. We present H0LiCOW (H0 Lenses in COSMOGRAIL’s Wellspring), a program that aims to measure H0 with < 3.5% uncertainty from five lens systems (B1608+656, RXJ1131−1231, HE 0435−1223, WFI2033−4723 and HE 1104−1805). We have been acquiring (1) time delays through COSMOGRAIL and Very Large Array monitoring, (2) high-resolution Hubble Space Telescope imaging for the lens mass modeling, (3) wide-field imaging and spectroscopy to characterize the lens environment, and (4) moderate-resolution spectroscopy to obtain the stellar velocity dispersion of the lenses for mass modeling. In cosmological models with one-parameter extension to flat ΛCDM, we expect to measure H0 to < 3.5% in most models, spatial curvature Ωk to 0.004, w to 0.14, and the effective number of neutrino species to 0.2 (1σ uncertainties) when combined with current CMB experiments. These are, respectively, a factor of ∼ 15, ∼ 2, and ∼ 1.5 tighter than CMB alone. Our data set will further enable us to study the stellar initial mass function of the lens galaxies, and the co-evolution of supermassive black holes and their host galaxies. This program will provide a foundation for extracting cosmological distances from the hundreds of time-delay lenses that are expected to be discovered in current and future surveys.
