An illustration of cosmic expansion. Credit: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center Conceptual Image Lab
By the 1920s, astronomers learned that the Universe was expanding as Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity predicted. This led to a debate among astrophysicists between those who believed the Universe began with a Big Bang and those who believed the Universe existed in a Steady State. By the 1960s, the first measurements of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) indicated that the former was the most likely scenario. And by the 1990s, the Hubble Deep Fields provided the deepest images of the Universe ever taken, revealing galaxies as they appeared just a few hundred million years after the Big Bang.
Over time, these discoveries led to an astounding realization: the rate at which the Universe is expanding (aka. the Hubble Constant) has not been constant over time! This led to the theory of Dark Energy, an invisible force that counteracts gravity and causes this expansion to accelerate. In a series of papers, an international team of researchers led by the University of Hawaii reported that black holes in ancient and dormant galaxies were growing more than expected. This constitutes (they claim) the first evidence that black holes could be the source of Dark Energy.
An illustration of cosmic expansion. Credit: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center Conceptual Image Lab
About 25 years ago, astrophysicists noticed something very interesting about the Universe. The fact that it was in a state of expansion had been known since the 1920s, thanks to the observation of Edwin Hubble. But thanks to the observations astronomers were making with the space observatory that bore his name (the Hubble Space Telescope), they began to notice how the rate of cosmic expansion was getting faster!
This has led to the theory that the Universe is filled with an invisible and mysterious force, known as Dark Energy (DE). Decades after it was proposed, scientists are still trying to pin down this elusive force that makes up about 70% of the energy budget of the Universe. According to a recent study by an international team of researchers, the XENON1T experiment may have already detected this elusive force, opening new possibilities for future DE research.
Things are not looking very good for the Hubble Space Telescope right now. On Sunday, June 13th, the telescope’s payload computer suddenly stopped working, prompting the main computer to put the telescope into safe mode. While the telescope itself and its science instruments remain in working order, science operations have been suspended until the operations team can figure out how to get the payload computer back online.
While attempting to restart the computer, the operations team has also tried to trace the issue to specific components in the payload computer and switch to their backup modules. As of June 30th, the team began looking into the Command Unit/Science Data Formatter (CU/SDF) and the Power Control Unit (PCU). Meanwhile, NASA is busy preparing and testing procedures to switch to backup hardware if either of these components are the culprit.
Simulation of dark matter and gas. Credit: Illustris Collaboration (CC BY-SA 4.0)
Since it was first theorized in the 1970s, astrophysicists and cosmologists have done their best to resolve the mystery that is Dark Matter. This invisible mass is believed to make up 85% of the matter in the Universe and accounts for 27% of its mass-energy density. But more than that, it also provides the large-scale skeletal structure of the Universe (the cosmic web), which dictates the motions of galaxies and material because of its gravitational influence.
Unfortunately, the mysterious nature of Dark Matter means that astronomers cannot study it directly, thus prevented them from measuring its distribution. However, it is possible to infer its distribution based on the observable influence its gravity has on local galaxies and other celestial objects. Using cutting-edge machine-learning techniques, a team of Korean-American astrophysicists was able to produce the most detailed map yet of the local Universe that shows what the “cosmic web” looks like.
The accuracy of Gaia distance measurements. Credit: ESA
Measuring the expansion of the universe is hard. For one thing, because the universe is expanding, the scale of your distance measurements affects the scale of the expansion. And since light from distant galaxies takes time to reach us, you can’t measure what the universe is, but rather what it was. Then there is the challenge of the cosmic distance ladder.
Illustration of gravity waves from a neutron star merger. Credit: NRAO/AUI/NSF
One of the tenets of our cosmological model is that the universe is expanding. For reasons we still don’t fully understand, space itself is stretching over time. It’s a strange idea to wrap your head around, but the evidence for it is conclusive. It is not simply that galaxies appear to be moving away from us, as seen by their redshift. Distant galaxies also appear larger than they should due to cosmic expansion. They are also distributed in superclusters separated by large voids. Then there is the cosmic microwave background, where even its small fluctuations in temperature confirm cosmic expansion.
An illustration of cosmic expansion. Credit: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center Conceptual Image Lab
For almost a century, astronomers have understood that the Universe is in a state of expansion. Since the 1990s, they have come to understand that as of four billion years ago, the rate of expansion has been speeding up. As this progresses, and the galaxy clusters and filaments of the Universe move farther apart, scientists theorize that the mean temperature of the Universe will gradually decline.
But according to new research led by the Center for Cosmology and AstroParticle Physics (CCAPP) at Ohio State University, it appears that the Universe is actually getting hotter as time goes on. After probing the thermal history of the Universe over the last 10 billion years, the team concluded that the mean temperature of cosmic gas has increased more than 10 times and reached about 2.2 million K (~2.2 °C; 4 million °F) today.
A new study considers what life could be like for civilizations 1 trillion years from now, when every star in the Universe will expand beyond the cosmic horizon. Credit: ESO/S. Brunier
Since the 1990s, astrophysicists have known that for the past few billion years, the Universe has been experiencing an accelerated rate of expansion. This gave rise to the theory that the Universe is permeated by a mysterious invisible energy known as “dark energy”, which acts against gravity and is pushing the cosmos apart. In time, this energy will become the dominant force in the Universe, causing all stars and galaxies to spread beyond the cosmic horizon.
At this point, all stars and galaxies in the Universe will no longer be visible or accessible from any other. The question remains, what will intelligent civilizations (such as our own) do for resources and energy at this point? This question was addressed in a recent paper by Dr. Abraham Loeb – the Frank B. Baird, Jr., Professor of Science at Harvard University and the Chair of the Harvard Astronomy Department.
The paper, “Securing Fuel for our Frigid Cosmic Future“, recently appeared online. As he indicates in his study, when the Universe is ten times its current age (roughly 138 billion years old), all stars outside the Local Group of galaxies will no be accessible to us since they will be receding away faster than the speed of light. For this reason, he recommends that humanity follow the lesson from Aesop’s fable, “The Ants and the Grasshopper”.
This classic tale tells the story of ants who spent the summer collecting food for the winter while the grasshopper chose to enjoy himself. While different versions of the story exist that offer different takes on the importance of hard work, charity, and compassion, the lesson is simple: always be prepared. In this respect, Loeb recommends that advanced species migrate to rich clusters of galaxies.
These clusters represent the largest reservoirs of matter bound by gravity and would therefore be better able to resist the accelerated expansion of the Universe. As Dr. Loeb told Universe Today via email:
“In my essay I point out that mother Nature was kind to us as it spontaneously gave birth to the same massive reservoir of fuel that we would have aspired to collect by artificial means. Primordial density perturbations from the early universe led to the gravitational collapse of regions as large as tens of millions of light years, assembling all the matter in them into clusters of galaxies – each containing the equivalent of a thousand Milky Way galaxies.”
Dr. Loeb also indicated where humanity (or other advanced civilizations) should consider relocating to when the expansion of the Universe causes the stars of the Local Group to expand beyond the cosmic horizon. Within 50 million light years, he indicates, likes the Virgo Cluster, which contains about a thousands times more matter than the Milky Way Galaxy. The second closest is the Coma Cluster, a collection of over 1000 galaxies located about 336 million light years away.
Diagram showing the Virgo Supercluster. Credit: Wikipedia Commons/Andrew Z. Colvin
In addition to offering a solution to the accelerating expansion of the Universe, Dr. Loeb’s study also presents some interesting possibilities when it comes to the search for extra-terrestrial intelligence (SETI). If, in fact, there are already advanced civilizations migrating to prepare for the inevitable expansion of the Universe, they may be detectable by various means. As Dr. Loeb explained:
“If traveling civilizations transmit powerful signals then we might be able to see evidence for their migration towards clusters of galaxies. Moreover, we would expected a larger concentration of advanced civilization in clusters than would be expected simply by counting the number of galaxies there. Those that settle there could establish more prosperous communities, in analogy to civilizations near rivers or lakes on Earth.”
This paper is similar to a study Dr. Loeb conducted back in 2011, which appeared in the Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics under the title “Cosmology with Hypervelocity Stars“. At the time, Dr. Loeb was addressing what would happen in the distant future when all extragalactic light sources will cease to be visible or accessible due to the accelerating expansion of the Universe.
This study was a follow-up to a 2001 paper in which Dr. Loeb addressed what would become of the Universe in billions of years – which appeared in the journal Physical Review Letters under the title “The Long–Term Future of Extragalactic Astronomy“. Shortly thereafter, Dr. Loeb and Freeman Dyson himself began to correspond about what could be done to address this problem.
An artist’s conception of a hypervelocity star that has escaped the Milky Way. Credit: NASA
Their correspondence was the subject of an article by Nathan Sanders (a writer for Astrobites) who recounted what Dr. Loeb and Dr. Dyson had to say on the matter. As Dr. Loeb recalls:
“A decade ago I wrote a few papers on the long-term future of the Universe, trillions of years from now. Since the cosmic expansion is accelerating, I showed that once the universe will age by a factor of ten (about a hundred billion years from now), all matter outside our Local Group of galaxies (which includes the Milky Way and the Andromeda galaxy, along with their satellites) will be receding away from us faster than light. After one of my papers was posted in 2011, Freeman Dyson wrote to me and suggested to a vast “cosmic engineering project” in which we will concentrate matter from a large-scale region around us to a small enough volume such that it will stay bound by its own gravity and not expand with the rest of the Universe.”
At the time, Dr. Loeb indicated that data gathered by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) indicated that attempts at “super-engineering” did not appear to be taking place. This was based on the fact that the galaxy clusters observed by the SDSS were not overdense, nor did they exhibit particularly high velocities (as would be expected). To this, Dr. Dyson wrote: “That is disappointing. On the other hand, if our colleagues have been too lazy to do the job, we have plenty of time to start doing it ourselves.”
A similar idea was presented in a recent paper by Dr. Dan Hooper, an astrophysicist from the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (FNAL) and the University of Chicago. In his study, Dr. Hooper suggested that advanced species could survive all stars in the Local Group expanding beyond the cosmic horizon (100 billion years from now), by harvesting stars across tens of millions of light years.
Artist impression of the 14 galaxies detected by ALMA as they appear in the very early, very distant universe. These galaxies are in the process of merging and will eventually form the core of a massive galaxy cluster. Credit: NRAO/AUI/NSF; S. Dagnello
This harvesting would consist of building unconventional Dyson Spheres that would use the energy they collected from stars to propel them towards the center of the species’ civilization. However, only stars that range in mass of 0.2 to 1 Solar Masses would be usable, as high-mass stars would evolve beyond their main sequence before reaching the destination and low-mass stars would not generate enough energy for acceleration to make it in time.
But as Dr. Loeb indicates, there are additional limitations to this approach, which makes migrating more attractive than harvesting.
“First, we do not know of any technology that enables moving stars around, and moreover Sun-like stars only shine for about ten billion years (of order the current age of the Universe) and cannot serve as nuclear furnaces that would keep us warm into the very distant future. Therefore, an advanced civilization does not need to embark on a giant construction project as suggested by Dyson and Hooper, but only needs to propel itself towards the nearest galaxy cluster and take advantage of the cluster resources as fuel for its future prosperity.”
While this may seem like a truly far-off concern, it does raise some interesting questions about the long-term evolution of the Universe and how intelligent civilizations may be forced to adapt. In the meantime, if it offers some additional possibilities for searching for extra-terrestrial intelligences (ETIs), then so much the better.
And as Dr. Dyson said, if there are currently no ETIs preparing for the coming “cosmic winter” with cosmic engineering projects, perhaps it is something humanity can plan to tackle someday!
These Hubble Space Telescope images showcase two of the 19 galaxies analyzed in a project to improve the precision of the universe's expansion rate, a value known as the Hubble constant. The color-composite images show NGC 3972 (left) and NGC 1015 (right), located 65 million light-years and 118 million light-years, respectively, from Earth. The yellow circles in each galaxy represent the locations of pulsating stars called Cepheid variables. Credits: NASA, ESA, A. Riess (STScI/JHU)
In the 1920s, Edwin Hubble made the groundbreaking revelation that the Universe was in a state of expansion. Originally predicted as a consequence of Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity, this confirmation led to what came to be known as Hubble’s Constant. In the ensuring decades, and thanks to the deployment of next-generation telescopes – like the aptly-named Hubble Space Telescope (HST) – scientists have been forced to revise this law.
In short, in the past few decades, the ability to see farther into space (and deeper into time) has allowed astronomers to make more accurate measurements about how rapidly the early Universe expanded. And thanks to a new survey performed using Hubble, an international team of astronomers has been able to conduct the most precise measurements of the expansion rate of the Universe to date.
Illustration of the depth by which Hubble imaged galaxies in prior Deep Field initiatives, in units of the Age of the Universe. Credit: NASA and A. Feild (STScI)
This tool is how astronomers have traditionally measured distances in the Universe, which consists of relying on distance markers like Cepheid variables – pulsating stars whose distances can be inferred by comparing their intrinsic brightness with their apparent brightness. These measurements are then compared to the way light from distance galaxies is redshifted to determine how fast the space between galaxies is expanding.
From this, the Hubble Constant is derived. To build their distant ladder, Riess and his team conducted parallax measurements using Hubble’s Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3) of eight newly-analyzed Cepheid variable stars in the Milky Way. These stars are about 10 times farther away than any studied previously – between 6,000 and 12,000 light-year from Earth – and pulsate at longer intervals.
To ensure accuracy that would account for the wobbles of these stars, the team also developed a new method where Hubble would measure a star’s position a thousand times a minute every six months for four years. The team then compared the brightness of these eight stars with more distant Cepheids to ensure that they could calculate the distances to other galaxies with more precision.
Illustration showing three steps astronomers used to measure the universe’s expansion rate (Hubble constant) to an unprecedented accuracy, reducing the total uncertainty to 2.3 percent. Credits: NASA/ESA/A. Feild (STScI)/and A. Riess (STScI/JHU)
Using the new technique, Hubble was able to capture the change in position of these stars relative to others, which simplified things immensely. As Riess explained in a NASA press release:
“This method allows for repeated opportunities to measure the extremely tiny displacements due to parallax. You’re measuring the separation between two stars, not just in one place on the camera, but over and over thousands of times, reducing the errors in measurement.”
Compared to previous surveys, the team was able to extend the number of stars analyzed to distances up to 10 times farther. However, their results also contradicted those obtained by the European Space Agency’s (ESA) Planck satellite, which has been measuring the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) – the leftover radiation created by the Big Bang – since it was deployed in 2009.
By mapping the CMB, Planck has been able to trace the expansion of the cosmos during the early Universe – circa. 378,000 years after the Big Bang. Planck’s result predicted that the Hubble constant value should now be 67 kilometers per second per megaparsec (3.3 million light-years), and could be no higher than 69 kilometers per second per megaparsec.
The Big Bang timeline of the Universe. Cosmic neutrinos affect the CMB at the time it was emitted, and physics takes care of the rest of their evolution until today. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/A. Kashlinsky (GSFC).
Based on their sruvey, Riess’s team obtained a value of 73 kilometers per second per megaparsec, a discrepancy of 9%. Essentially, their results indicate that galaxies are moving at a faster rate than that implied by observations of the early Universe. Because the Hubble data was so precise, astronomers cannot dismiss the gap between the two results as errors in any single measurement or method. As Reiss explained:
“The community is really grappling with understanding the meaning of this discrepancy… Both results have been tested multiple ways, so barring a series of unrelated mistakes. it is increasingly likely that this is not a bug but a feature of the universe.”
These latest results therefore suggest that some previously unknown force or some new physics might be at work in the Universe. In terms of explanations, Reiss and his team have offered three possibilities, all of which have to do with the 95% of the Universe that we cannot see (i.e. dark matter and dark energy). In 2011, Reiss and two other scientists were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for their 1998 discovery that the Universe was in an accelerated rate of expansion.
Consistent with that, they suggest that Dark Energy could be pushing galaxies apart with increasing strength. Another possibility is that there is an undiscovered subatomic particle out there that is similar to a neutrino, but interacts with normal matter by gravity instead of subatomic forces. These “sterile neutrinos” would travel at close to the speed of light and could collectively be known as “dark radiation”.
This illustration shows the evolution of the Universe, from the Big Bang on the left, to modern times on the right. Credit: NASA
Any of these possibilities would mean that the contents of the early Universe were different, thus forcing a rethink of our cosmological models. At present, Riess and colleagues don’t have any answers, but plan to continue fine-tuning their measurements. So far, the SHoES team has decreased the uncertainty of the Hubble Constant to 2.3%.
This is in keeping with one of the central goals of the Hubble Space Telescope, which was to help reduce the uncertainty value in Hubble’s Constant, for which estimates once varied by a factor of 2.
So while this discrepancy opens the door to new and challenging questions, it also reduces our uncertainty substantially when it comes to measuring the Universe. Ultimately, this will improve our understanding of how the Universe evolved after it was created in a fiery cataclysm 13.8 billion years ago.
Since the 1990s, scientists have been aware that for the past several billion years, the Universe has been expanding at an accelerated rate. They have further hypothesized that some form of invisible energy must be responsible for this, one which makes up 68.3% of the mass-energy of the observable Universe. While there is no direct evidence that this “Dark Energy” exists, plenty of indirect evidence has been obtained by observing the large-scale mass density of the Universe and the rate at which is expanding.
But in the coming years, scientists hope to develop technologies and methods that will allow them to see exactly how Dark Energy has influenced the development of the Universe. One such effort comes from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, where scientists are working to develop an instrument that will create a comprehensive 3D map of a third of the Universe so that its growth history can be tracked.
