US, WASHINGTON (ORDO NEWS) — Professor of the University of Geneva (UNIGE) Lucas Lombriser put forward a hypothesis explaining the speed of expansion of the universe, media reported.
According to the portal Phys.org, the Belgian physicist Georges Lemaitre was the first to suggest that the universe has been expanding since the Big Bang, which occurred 13.8 billion years ago. In 1929, this hypothesis was confirmed by the American astronomer Edwin Hubble. He found that every galaxy is moving away from us, and the most distant galaxies are moving fastest. From this, scientists concluded that once all the galaxies were at one point, which in time coincides only with the time of the Big Bang.
After these studies, the Hubble-Lemeter law appeared, which allowed physicists to calculate the parameter of the expansion rate of the universe – the Hubble constant.
According to the best estimate, the universe is expanding 70 kilometers per second faster every 3.26 million light years. But there is no consensus on the fair value of the constant – there are two methods of calculation that are independent of each other. Data on them differ from each other by 10%.
Lombraiser suggested that the universe is not homogeneous, as previously thought, and matter inside the galaxy is distributed differently than outside. The physicist believes that because of this it is difficult to calculate the variations in the average density of matter in volumes a thousand times larger than the size of the galaxy.
The calculations can become reliable if we imagine that the Earth, our Galaxy and the thousands of galaxies closest to us are moving in a “bubble”, where the density of matter is much lower than the density of the universe known to science, the physicist suggested.
According to his assumption, the diameter of the “bubble” is 250 million light years, and this is enough to accommodate a galaxy, which would serve as a reference point for measuring distances. Then the density of matter inside the “bubble” will be half as much as in the rest of the universe.
This gives a new value for the Hubble constant, which is consistent with the calculation using one of the main methods and is about 74 kilometers per second per megaparsec.
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