Word: virgo
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...team used a clever, indirect method of measuring the age of the universe. First the scientists determined the distance to a group of galaxies called the Virgo cluster. Then they took advantage of a trick first used by Edwin Hubble, the astronomer who discovered, back in the 1920s, that the universe is expanding -- and for whom the space telescope was named. If the whole cosmos is blowing up like a balloon, Hubble reasoned, then you can calculate backward to see when the balloon began to inflate...
...space telescope managed to spot Cepheids in M100, a particularly distant galaxy in the Virgo cluster, which enabled the Hubble scientists to estimate how far the cluster is from earth. According to their report in the current Nature, M100 is 56 million light-years away, and the Hubble constant is 80, leading to the conclusion that the universe is at most 12 billion years old. The uncertainty arises because it's unknown how tightly the universe is packed with matter; the gravity from a high density would have slowed the universe's expansion considerably by now, meaning that it could...
Several mitigating factors could prevent such a conceptual catastrophe. For one thing, the space-telescope astronomers acknowledge a significant margin of error in their calculations. It's not certain, for example, whether M100 lies right at Virgo's center or somewhere on the near or far edge. The Hubble numbers do broadly agree, however, with results announced last month by two other groups working with ground-based telescopes...
...telescope measured the velocity of gases swirling closely around the center of M87, an elliptical galaxy in the Virgo cluster, about 50 million light-years away from Earth...
...loss marked the last game for seniors Lisa Backus, Meave O'Mara, Elise Dalboni, Jennifer Childs, Ann Pellegrini, Sue Virgo, and Jenny Windsor. Windsor played the entire first half despite fracturing one finger and dislocating another...