Quasars Tell The Story Of How Fast The Young Universe Expanded

(Before It's News)

Artist’s conception of how the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey uses quasars to make measurements. The light these objects sends out gets absorbed by gas in between the receiver and the source. The gas is then “imprinted with a subtle ring-like pattern of known physical scale”, the Sloan Digital Sky Survey stated. Credit: Zosia Rostomian (Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory) and Andreu Font-Ribera (BOSS Lyman-alpha team, Berkeley Lab.)

For those who saw the Cosmos episode on William Herschel describing telescopes as time machines, here is a clear example of that. By examining 140,000 objects called quasars (galaxies with an active black hole at their centers), astronomers have charted the expansion rate of the universe — not now, but 10.8 billion years ago.

This is the most precise measurement ever of the universe’s expansion rate at any point in time, the science teams said, with the calculation showing the universe was expanding by 1% every 44 million years at that time. (That figure is to 2% precision, the researchers added.)

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Read the rest of Quasars Tell The Story Of How Fast The Young Universe Expanded (261 words)

© Elizabeth Howell for Universe Today, 2014. |
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Post tags: baryon, baryon oscillation spectroscopic survey, expansion of universe, quasars, Sloan Digital Sky Survey

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