Word: cosmically
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...that, things get murky. The experts don't know for sure how old or how big the universe is. They don't know what most of it is made of. They don't know in any detail how it began or how it will end. And, beyond the local cosmic neighborhood, they don't know much about what it looks like. Each of these questions is now under study; each bears directly on the others; and each could yield within the next few years to the intellectual and instrumental firepower now being brought to bear on it. Assuming, that...
That still isn't far enough out to give a direct measure of the Hubble-the cosmic rate of expansion. But M100 is part of a huge group of galaxies known as the Virgo cluster. The M100 calculation gave the astronomers the distance to Virgo, and they used that number in turn to estimate the distance to the Coma cluster of galaxies, about five times as far away. Coma, finally, is far enough out that it's a reliable indicator of the Hubble Constant. Based on Freedman's analysis, the Constant comes in at 80, indicating a universe between...
While most astronomers take these numbers very seriously-along with the cosmic paradox they imply-Allan Sandage, Freedman's grumpy colleague down the hall, is having none of it. He doesn't quibble with her measurement of the distance to M100, but insists that the analysis breaks down after that. Like most astronomers, Sandage has his favorite method of gauging the relative distance of galaxies. He finds a type of supernova-an exploding star-and compares supernova brightnesses from one galaxy to another. He claims, as he has done for more than 20 years, that the Hubble Constant is lower...
...right and Sandage is wrong, as many cosmic handicappers are betting, then the age crisis won't go away without some fundamental change in the way astronomers understand the cosmos. That means at least some scientists will have to give up their cherished beliefs about how stars work or how the universe is organized or what it's made of-or maybe even all of the above...
...true, the finding is of literally cosmic significance: there are so many neutrinos in the universe that they alone could account for some 20% of the dark matter that inflation theory requires. Just add in another 80% worth of WIMPS and you've got it, says Joel Primack of the University of California, Santa Cruz. With this recipe, Primack has used supercomputers to produce synthetic universes that look almost identical to the data gathered by real-life astronomical observers. But some theorists think Primack is grasping too quickly at a "discovery" that is still controversial...