New study suggests that the universe is younger

[QuantumT]

Quote

Riess observed 70 Cepheid stars — stars that pulse at a well-observed rate — calculated their distance and rate, and then compared them with a certain type of supernovae that are used as measuring sticks. It took about two years for the Hubble telescope to make these measurements, but eventually Riess calculated an expansion rate of 74.

Using that 74 figure means the universe is somewhere between 12.5 billion and 13 billion years old. That’s much younger than the established estimates of 13.6 billion to 13.8 billion.

Article: https://www.apnews.com/fac50d45a19f4239848b1712cfd22c36

Another (better?) article: https://astronomynow.com/2018/07/13/cosmic-mystery-deepens-with-conflicting-measurements-of-hubble-constant/

Edited April 27, 2019 by QuantumT

[MigL]

Oh well, add another 'dark' entity ( other than matter and energy ) to explain away these conflicting results.

Personally, I think God is getting back at the doubters.
The more we learn about the universe, the more 'gaps' He/She introduces to confound us.

( just kidding,  )

[Strange]

That is not a very good article. It doesn't really explain that the important problem is the difference between measuring the Hubble constant from the red-shifts of distant galaxies versus the cosmic microwave background. This discrepancy has been known about for quite a long time. This study just reduces the possibility of errors in the red-shift measurements.

I think this is a better overview: https://astronomynow.com/2018/07/13/cosmic-mystery-deepens-with-conflicting-measurements-of-hubble-constant/

[QuantumT]

3 minutes ago, Strange said:

That is not a very good article.

I added your link to the OP.

I just heard a rumor and googled it, and the AP link was all I found.

The question now is, do we postpone the 14th anniversary?

[beecee]

Here is another article and paper......

https://phys.org/news/2019-04-hubble-universe-faster.html

excerpt: 

"The Hubble astronomers then combined their result with another set of observations, made by the Araucaria Project, a collaboration between astronomers from institutions in Chile, the U.S., and Europe. This group made distance measurements to the Large Magellanic Cloud by observing the dimming of light as one star passes in front of its partner in eclipsing binary-star systems.

The combined measurements helped the SH0ES Team refine the Cepheids' true brightness. With this more accurate result, the team could then "tighten the bolts" of the rest of the distance ladder that extends deeper into space.

The new estimate of the Hubble constant is 74 kilometers (46 miles) per second per megaparsec. This means that for every 3.3 million light-years farther away a galaxy is from us, it appears to be moving 74 kilometers (46 miles) per second faster, as a result of the expansion of the universe. The number indicates that the universe is expanding at a 9% faster rate than the prediction of 67 kilometers (41.6 miles) per second per megaparsec, which comes from Planck's observations of the early universe, coupled with our present understanding of the universe."

 

the paper:

https://arxiv.org/pdf/1903.07603.pdf

ABSTRACT:

We present an improved determination of the Hubble constant from Hubble Space Telescope (HST) observations of 70 long-period Cepheids in the Large Magellanic Cloud. These were obtained with the same WFC3 photometric system used to measure extragalactic Cepheids in the hosts of Type Ia supernovae. Gyroscopic control of HST was employed to reduce overheads while collecting a large sample of widely-separated Cepheids. The Cepheid Period-Luminosity relation provides a zeropoint-independent link with 0.4% precision between the new 1.2% geometric distance to the LMC from Detached Eclipsing Binaries (DEBs) measured by Pietrzy´nski et al. (2019) and the luminosity of SNe Ia. Measurements and analysis of the LMC Cepheids were completed prior to knowledge of the new DEB LMC distance. Combined with a refined calibration of the count-rate linearity of WFC3-IR with 0.1% precision (Riess et al. 2019), these three improved elements together reduce the overall uncertainty in the geometric calibration of the Cepheid distance ladder based on the LMC from 2.5% to 1.3%. Using only the LMC DEBs to calibrate the ladder we find H0=74.22 ± 1.82 km s−1 Mpc−1 including systematic uncertainties, 3% higher than before for this particular anchor. Combining the LMC DEBs, masers in NGC 4258 and Milky Way parallaxes yields our best estimate: H0 = 74.03 ± 1.42 km s−1 Mpc−1 , including systematics, an uncertainty of 1.91% —15% lower than our best previous result. Removing any one of these anchors changes H0 by less than 0.7%. The difference between H0 measured locally and the value inferred from Planck CMB and ΛCDM is 6.6±1.5 km s−1 Mpc−1 or 4.4 σ (P=99.999% for Gaussian errors) in significance, raising the discrepancy beyond a plausible level of chance. We summarize independent tests which show this discrepancy is not attributable to an error in any one source or measurement, increasing the odds that it results from a cosmological feature beyond ΛCDM.