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See, that’s what the app is perfect for.

Sounds perfect Wahhhh, I don’t wanna
jillraggett
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Plant of the Day

Wednesday 12 June 2019

Rarely found in cultivation this Gleditsia delavayi was growing over this mown path in Cambridge Botanic Garden, UK. This deciduous tree has fearsome thorns on the trunk and branches which may not make it a popular species for ornamental situations!

Jill Raggett

gleditsia deciduoustree thorns botanicgarden plants writtledesign mhort gardens horticulture arboriculture tree mownpath cambridgebotanicgarden cambridge garden
startswithabang

No, The Universe Cannot Be A Billion Years Younger Than We Think

“There may be some who contend we don’t know what the age of the Universe is, and that this conundrum over the expanding Universe could result in a Universe much younger than what we have today. But that would invalidate a large amount of robust data we already have and accept; a far more likely resolution is that the dark matter and dark energy densities are different than we previously suspected.

Something interesting is surely going on with the Universe to provide us with such a fantastic discrepancy. Why does the Universe seem to care which technique we use to measure the expansion rate? Is dark energy or some other cosmic property changing over time? Is there a new field or force? Does gravity behave differently on cosmic scales than expected? More and better data will help us find out, but a significantly younger Universe is unlikely to be the answer.”

There’s a fascinating conundrum facing modern cosmology today. If you measure the distant light from the Universe, from the cosmic microwave background or from how the large-scale structure within it has evolved, you can get a value for the expansion rate of the Universe: 67 km/s/Mpc. On the other hand, you can also get a measurement for that rate from measuring individual objects through a technique known as the cosmic distance ladder, and you get a value of 73 km/s/Mpc. These two values differ by 9%, and are inconsistent with one another. Recently, one of the groups studying this puzzle claimed that the Universe might be 9% younger than currently expected: 12.5 billion years old instead of 13.8 billion years old.

That is almost certainly wrong, as it would conflict with extremely important pieces of astronomical data. This really is a puzzle, but a younger Universe isn’t the solution. Here’s why.

science astrophysics cosmology age of the Universe expanding universe
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