Word: freedman
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...also pays to listen to Freedman. She's a highly respected observational astronomer, and so are the 13 others on her space-telescope team. Moreover, theirs is only the latest in a series of measurements that point to a relatively young universe. Just a month before these results appeared in the journal Nature, two other sets of astronomers came out with their own young-universe observations. And while a handful of studies have emerged over the past few years arguing instead for an older cosmos, many more have converged on a younger age. The Freedman team's observations are considered...
...that galaxies exist beyond the Milky Way. For decades, Sandage's results have suggested that the cosmos is 15 billion to 20 billion years old or thereabouts. That fits beautifully with cosmological theories-but almost nobody believes him anymore. Instead they're listening to a young whippersnapper named Wendy Freedman, who happens to work just down the hall from Sandage at the Carnegie's center in Pasadena, California. Freedman and a group of colleagues have lately used the Hubble Space Telescope to peg the age at somewhere between 8 billion and 12 billion years-which would make the cosmos...
WEIRD DATA, WEIRD THEORIES: The bewildering discoveries by Lauer, Postman, Freedman and company are only the latest in a barrage of bafflements that stargazers have had to absorb lately. Over the past few years, astronomers have uncovered the existence of the Great Wall, a huge conglomeration of galaxies stretching across 500 million light-years of space; the Great Attractor, a mysterious concentration of mass hauling much of the local universe off in the direction of the constellations Hydra and Centaurus; Great Voids, where few galaxies can be found; and galaxies caught in the throes of formation a mere billion years...
...CRISIS: "You can't be older than your ma," quips Christopher Impey of the University of Arizona's Steward Observatory. Sounds obvious, maybe, but if Freedman and her colleagues are right about their space-telescope observations, it would seem that the universe hasn't caught on to this bit of common sense. The most straightforward interpretation of their data implies that the cosmos is 12 billion years old, max. But experts insist that the oldest stars in the Milky Way have been around for at least 14 billion years. "They could quite easily be several billion years older than that...
...observations were moved to the head of the Hubble schedule, and by July, Freedman was looking at a pattern on her computer screen that was as familiar as the face of an old friend. "Boom!" she remembers. "All of a sudden there was this glorious Cepheid light curve, as beautiful as any that have ever been measured." By the end of the observing run, Freedman and her colleagues found 19 more, enough to peg M100's distance at some 56 million light-years from Earth...