PowerPoint kills you

How would you communicate your actions to others without a PowerPoint file? Can you imagine attending a meeting where PowerPoint is banned? As a matter of fact, PowerPoint took power over your…

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How Fast Is The Universe Expanding? Incompatible Answers Point To New Physics

The expanding Universe, full of galaxies and the complex structure we observe today, arose from a smaller, hotter, denser, more uniform state. It took thousands of scientists working for hundreds of years for us to arrive at this picture, and yet the lack of a consensus on what the expansion rate actually is tells us that either something is dreadfully wrong, we have an unidentified error somewhere, or there’s a new scientific revolution just on the horizon. (C. FAUCHER-GIGUÈRE, A. LIDZ, AND L. HERNQUIST, SCIENCE 319, 5859 (47))

As more data comes in, the puzzle gets deeper and deeper.

Whenever you set out to solve a problem, there are a series of steps you have to take in order to arrive at the answer. Assuming your methods are sound and you don’t make any major errors, the answer you get should be correct. It might be a little higher or a little lower that the “true” value, as measurement (and other) uncertainties are real and cannot be eliminated, but the answer you obtain should be independent of the method you use.

For more than a decade, a conundrum has been building in the field of astrophysics: although there are many different ways of measuring the rate at which the Universe is expanding, they fall into two different classes.

A slew of new studies show that the mystery is now deepening even further.

Modern measurement tensions from the distance ladder (red) with early signal data from the CMB and BAO (blue) shown for contrast. It is plausible that the early signal method is correct and there’s a fundamental flaw with the distance ladder; it’s plausible that there’s a small-scale error biasing the early signal method and the distance ladder is correct, or that both groups are right and some form of new physics (shown at top) is the culprit. But right now, we cannot be sure. (ADAM RIESS (PRIVATE COMMUNICATION))

Above, you can see an illustration of a great many measurements — from different methods, experiments and data sets — of the present rate at which the Universe is expanding. On the one side, you can see results of the early signal method, which includes the imprint of the Universe’s expansion in the cosmic microwave background (from both Planck and WMAP), in the cosmic microwave background’s polarization data (an entirely independent data set), and from baryon acoustic oscillations which imprint themselves in the way galaxies cluster on distance scales of a few billion light-years.

On the other side, you can see results from the distance ladder method, which includes a myriad of independent methods using perhaps a dozen different distance indicators in various combinations. As you can clearly see, there’s a severe…

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