We are confused about how old the Universe is. Until recently, astronomers estimated that the Big Bang occurred between 12 and 14 billion years ago. Astronomers can place a lower limit to the age of the universe by studying globular clusters. Globular clusters are a dense collection of roughly a million stars. Stellar densities near the center of the globular cluster are enormous. If we lived near the center of one, there would be several hundred thousand stars closer to us than Proxima Centauri, the star nearest to the Sun.
Really, we are confused about how fast the Universe is expanding today, measured by how fast distant objects are moving away from us, which directly determines how old the Universe is. This conundrum arises from a mismatch between two rigorously vetted approaches to measuring the expansion rate of the Universe. One uses the baby picture of the Universe, the cosmic microwave background. This relic radiation, imprinted on the cosmos shortly after the Big Bang, provides a snapshot of the Universe’s infancy, shedding light on its earliest moments. The other approach relies on constructing a “cosmic distance ladder” with pulsating stars and supernovae in the nearby universe. These measurements have led to a fascinating puzzle, as these methods yield different results, sparking the so-called “Hubble tension.” Our presenter’s research investigates possible solutions to this tension in the form of new, undiscovered physics. For our April General Meeting, she explored this debate on the age of the Universe, journeying through cosmic time and drawing a through line across the evolution of the Universe. Our speaker wasTanvi Karwal is a theoretical cosmologist working at the University of Chicago. Dr. Karwal earned her PhD at Johns Hopkins and spent time doing research as a postdoc at UPenn. She thinks about everything larger than a galaxy but makes an exception for cake. She thinks about cake a lot. She also thinks about how fast the Universe is expanding, about dark energy, dark matter and how it all comes together to form our Universe today. Tanvi is originally from India, has strong opinions on desserts, and likes to illustrate.
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