Is It Time For A New Model Of The Universe?

Is the Hubble constant—a key part of how we measure the expansion of our universe—in a crisis? Some cosmologists say yes.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  WNYC is supported by Bear. Science is about asking questions, testing, trying again. It's not easy, but it's relentless. It evolves, and that's why science delivers. Learn more at sciencedelivers.com.

• 0:14Ira Flatow?

  Science Friday is supported by MathWorks, creator of MATLAB and Simulink software for technical computing and model-based design. MathWorks, accelerating the pace of discovery in engineering and science. Learn more at mathworks.com. I'm Flora Lichtman. And I'm Ira Flatow, and you're listening to Science Friday. Today on the podcast is our model of the universe broken.

• 0:42Speaker 02

  So it could be very broken or a little broken. All options right now are on the table.

• 0:47Ira Flatow?

  We're going to start with some simple questions like, how old is the universe? Simple, right? How did it form? Astronomers and physicists, starting way back with Einstein, have filled up lots of chalkboards trying to model the universe, tweaking the model with each new discovery. Expanding universe? That's no problem. We'll put in the cosmological constant to take care of that. Wait, the expansion is accelerating? The constant is not constant? And if it's accelerating even faster than we predicted? Uh-oh, Houston, we may have a problem. But there's more. Seems that dark matter may be stranger than we thought. Dark energy is behaving strangely.

• 1:29Ira Flatow?

  Strange radio signals have been detected coming through the ice in Antarctica. And wait, they found the missing matter. The normal stuff, not all that other dark stuff, the stuff that's been missing all these years. What the heck is going on here? We start the hour by talking about why some cosmologists are saying it may be time for a standard model overhaul. And here to comb the cosmos and massage the matter are my guests. Wendy Friedman, professor of astronomy and astrophysics at the University of Chicago, and Dan Skolnick, associate professor of physics at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina. Welcome to Science Friday.

• 2:09Speaker 02

  Thanks so much for having us.

• 2:11Ira Flatow?

  Nice to have you. Okay, let's start at the beginning. Let's talk about the standard model of the universe. Wendy, what is the standard model?

• 2:23Speaker 03

  Our standard model is a model in which the universe is expanding, as Edwin Hubble taught us, and a model that contains about one-third matter and two-thirds in this form that we call dark energy. And the matter that we know and love is only about one-sixth of the overall matter mass in the universe, mass density. And so it's a rather strange model in the sense that we don't yet know what the dark matter is and we don't know what's causing this acceleration. But nevertheless, for 25 years now, this standard model has held up with the best available data. But now there are these exciting indications

• 3:08Speaker 03

  that perhaps there are things missing from our standard model and that's what we're actively trying to understand.

• 3:14Ira Flatow?

  In fact, Anna, in a story about your work, you're quoted as saying, "To some respect, our model of cosmology might be," I love this word, "broken." What do you mean? How broken is it?

• 3:27Speaker 02

  Right, it's a great question. So it could be very broken or a little broken. It could be that we need to completely rethink what dark energy is or what dark matter is. Or it could be just actually a very small tweak. Maybe there's another species of neutrinos or maybe how dark energy used to behave was a little bit different. So all options right now are on the table.

• 3:54Ira Flatow?

  Wendy, you agree?

• 3:55Speaker 03

  Yes, I agree. I think this is what is so exciting about the time we're living in. Is, you know, as you push the forefront of any field, you don't know where things are going to land. But there are these exciting prospects that maybe there's something new to be discovered. And we'll see how it all turns out. But this is the exciting time. Hints of, tantalizing hints of something new.

• 4:15Flora Lichtman?

  Are there places where you disagree?

• 4:19Speaker 03

  Disagree on the model, I think it in terms of interpretation now, how significant are these new effects that we're seeing, and I think only time is going to tell us how that will turn out. It's always difficult when you're making very challenging observations. We're trying to measure things that are hundreds of millions of light years away from us at enormous precision and accuracy, and that's challenging. And so we'll see where it ends up.

• 4:46Ira Flatow?

  Let's start then at some of these questions I raised. For example, let's talk about the Hubble constant, Wendy. Why is it so important? There's disagreement about what that constant should be. The disagreement is called Hubble tension. Tell us, I'm getting excited about listening about that, Wendy.

• 5:03Speaker 03

  So the Hubble constant is a measure of how fast the universe is expanding at the present time, today, in our own local neighborhood of the universe. And it's been something that we've been trying to measure now for almost a century, since Edwin Hubble discovered the expansion. And even until recently, a few decades ago, astronomers were arguing about whether the universe had a Hubble constant of 50 or a Hubble constant of 100. And those had very different implications, a universe that was either 20 billion years old or 10 billion years old, a very large difference. And so in the early 2000s, we were able to make measurements with Hubble and determined

• 5:47Speaker 03

  that the age was about 13.7 billion years old with a Hubble constant of 72 or 73. And now, as the precision has continued to improve, we're getting to a few percent accuracy, and measurements of the Hubble constant have centered between values of 67 and 73 or 74 or so. And although that now sounds like they agree compared to where we came from, between 50 and 100, if the uncertainties are small enough in those measurements, that would indicate that there's something really fundamentally wrong with our standard model. So the standard model...

• 6:31Speaker 03

  predicts, and these are measurements based on the cosmic microwave background fitting to the standard model, predicts what the expansion rate would be today, and that that value is sixty seven or so.

• 6:43Ira Flatow?

  Uh huh.

• 6:44Speaker 03

  And yet, the local measurements, uh, many of them, are giving a higher value. Now, what's new is that these measurements from the microwave background have been made at a precision of better than one percent, which is extraordinarily accurate and unusual for cosmology. And so what we need to ascertain is, how significant is this difference? And the reason that it's that's exciting is that, you know, we live in this universe, and whatever we predict, uh, should match up with what we're measuring, and right now they don't.

• 7:16Ira Flatow?

  And Dan has been calling it a Hubble crisis, Dan.

• 7:20Speaker 02

  Right. So astronomers or physicists, we use the word tension when something's getting significant, but you're not really sure, is it gonna stay, or could it kind of disappear? And what's been amazing over the last decade or so is, the community has really worked on this, and now there's a number of techniques of using supernovae, or pulsating stars, or strong lens measurements, all these different ways. And kind of on the local side, on the nearby side, everyone seems to be in one direction compared to the prediction. So this is kind of happening now so much, I think we're transitioning from tension to crisis.

• 7:56Ira Flatow?

  Okay, let's move on to some other topics I brought up, and that is, Dan, the universe is expanding faster than predicted by theoretical models? Expanding faster than can be explained by physics?

• 8:07Speaker 02

  Right. So there's a, there's a couple pieces there. So that we have this model that there is dark energy that's making the universe expand faster and faster, accelerates its expansion. But just this last year, various teams have started measuring that maybe this dark energy that we typically describe with a cosmological constant, supposed to be constant in space and time, maybe it's getting weaker. And that, I think, no one really expected, and has caused a ton of excitement in, in the cosmology community.

• 8:39Ira Flatow?

  Mm hmm. Do we have any idea why this is happening?

• 8:43Speaker 02

  There's a lot of ideas of what could be going on, but kind of too many ideas and nothing as beautiful and as simple as what Einstein first came up with, this cosmological constant idea. So astronomers and physicists really love the idea of simplicity and beauty. And there's not going to have been a second great idea that's matched the one that we have that feels itself pretty not satisfactory.

• 9:08Ira Flatow?

  But Wendy, this sort of kicked in, not at the, you know, not at the beginning of the universe, it sort of kicked in in our measurements a little later.

• 9:15Speaker 03

  Yes, well, that's the beauty now is I think we're living at this exciting time where we can make measurements, not only locally, but we can look back farther in time and in distance. And, and these differences are starting to poke up out of, out of the data. And the question is, you know, as you make new measurements, will they survive as you make more and more accurate measurements? And so there's these tantalizing hints right now, and it will likely take several years before, you know, and these are ongoing programs. There's much more data coming, which is what makes this so exciting. And we'll see, either the signal will get stronger or, or it won't. And, and right now, we don't know where it will end up, but.

• 9:57Ira Flatow?

  Yeah. My, my question to both of you is, do we need new physics that we, you know, just don't know what's happening? I mean, if you don't know with dark energy and dark matter, if you don't know what 96% of the universe is made out of, what do you know?

• 10:14Speaker 02

  Right. Yeah, it's a, it's a really great question. The thing that's always kind of surprised me about our model is we say, okay, there's 95% that we don't understand. And that 95% can be explained by two things, dark matter and dark energy. And each of those things can just be explained by one thing. It's super simple. Whereas us people living on our planet in this galaxy, we have this world of complexity and periodic tables and all these different things that make us, make us up. But the rest of the universe, that's super simple. And maybe it'll just turn out that we're going to learn sometime soon that the rest of the universe can be complicated too.

• 10:51Ira Flatow?

  What do you mean, super simple? If you, you know, why, why don't we know then if it's so super simple?

• 10:55Speaker 02

  This is why we have to do the measurements. I mean, physicists always start out with the simplest theory possible and then wait for something to prove that wrong. I think that's kind of where we're seeing.

• 11:06Ira Flatow?

  Wendy, you agree it's super simple?

• 11:09Ira Flatow?

  We might have lost my day. Okay. We have, uh, well, do we need new instrumentation then, Dan? New tools to figure this out?

• 11:17Speaker 02

  Absolutely, and we are getting it. Just this year, the Ver Ruben Observatory is starting. I heard you talk about that earlier. We have new space telescopes launching. This is kind of really the golden age of astronomy instrumentation.

• 11:34Ira Flatow?

  Don't go away, because after the break, we're going to hear about some of these new instruments.

• 11:39Speaker 03

  The opportunities now to make these measurements have never been greater. So yes, it's an enormously exciting time.

• 11:49Speaker 00

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• 12:34Speaker 00

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• 13:19Speaker 00

  Learn more at sciencedelivers.com.

• 13:22Speaker 05

  Support for Science Friday comes from the William K. Bose Junior Foundation.

• 13:34Ira Flatow?

  We're talking this hour about the mysteries of the universe and I'm aligned with this is Dan Skolnick, Associate Professor of Physics at Duke University. And let's go right to the phones to Raymond in Lemoore, California. Hi Raymond.

• 13:49Speaker 06

  Hey, how you doing?

• 13:50Ira Flatow?

  Hey there, go ahead.

• 13:53Speaker 06

  Yeah, my question was, I'm endlessly fascinated with this subject, but is there a, does the scientific community have like a best guess on what the dark matter and dark energy actually is? Because I've read so many things and, you know, possibly antimatter moving backwards through time and all kinds of stuff. And also, is there a possibility that, you know, with the multiverse theory, that it could be the universe next door? You know, gravitational pull, pulling and causing different stuff?

• 14:23Ira Flatow?

  Yeah, Dan, everybody wants to know.

• 14:26Speaker 02

  Great, yeah. So, best guess, that's the things that we put into our standard model. So for dark energy, our best guess is that it's what we call cosmological constant. It's like the vacuum energy of space. The problem is that our theories of quantum mechanics don't really match up to the magnitude of the dark energy we see. So we're pretty kind of stuck on a theory there. For dark matter, we know that it gravitationally attracts and that it doesn't interact with light. So, the best idea is that it's just the kind of cold dark matter. And there's a number of ideas of kind of what is the particle that does it. And in places like CERN, the Collider, in Europe, they're trying to actually find

• 15:11Speaker 02

  this in laboratories. But so far, no one's been able to see it. In terms of the multiverse, I'd say that it's probably not that there's like a neighboring universe that's bumping that's kind of causing this. This feels very internal to our universe. The kind of weird thing in terms of the multiverse, and kind of why that gets raised in terms of dark energy and dark matter, is that for some reason, the amount of dark energy and the amount of dark matter that we have seems kind of finely tuned so that eventually there'll be life in this universe. So, people say, well, maybe there are other universes, other parts of the universe, where dark matter and dark energy are different amounts. And we just happen to be in the good part of the universe, or the good universe.

• 15:56Ira Flatow?

  Isn't one of the mysteries of dark? Energy is that even though we have found it, there should be a whole lot more of it?

• 16:04Speaker 02

  Right, yes. So, so if the vacuum, the, the energy of space itself, empty space.

• 16:11Ira Flatow?

  It has, it has energy.

• 16:12Speaker 02

  Yeah, it has energy, right.

• 16:14Ira Flatow?

  Right.

• 16:14Speaker 02

  And it kind of, if we, if we kind of put the, put our theories to kind of how big, how strong that should be, it just does not match what we see. So what's kind of so frustrating now with where we are is that our best model, even our kind of theory is, isn't, isn't consistent with it.

• 16:31Ira Flatow?

  You know, I love it. We, we don't know what it is, but we should have a lot more of it.

• 16:37Ira Flatow?

  I remember hearing Steven Weinberg talk about this years ago and

• 16:40Speaker 02

  Right.

• 16:40Ira Flatow?

  how much more there was. Okay, let's go to the phones. So Pat in St. Louis. Hi, Pat.

• 16:45Speaker 07

  Hey. Um, I have a question about, about black holes. I was thinking that when a black hole starts sucking out all the energy and light and, and squeezing everything like it does and pushes everything out, that, um, that when that happens, that's their big bang. That's the, like a whole new universe opening up. And I posed that question to, um, cosmologists at Washington University, um, a month or so ago. And he said that, uh, there are equations that would show that that's possible, but that, he said it couldn't be because the equations don't go the other way. Well, my idea was that not everything in the universe goes only one way, I mean, both ways.

• 17:30Speaker 07

  So why not? But I didn't get a chance to ask a follow-up question. So it's been on my mind ever since.

• 17:35Ira Flatow?

  All right. Now we've got Dan in captivity here for you to answer that.

• 17:40Speaker 02

  Great, yeah. It's, it's a really great question. So, uh, black holes have kind of always been a really important area of study because a lot of the different scales of physics mix. You have general relativity, which explains gravity. That's the big scales. And then you have quantum mechanics, which explains all the small scales. And a black hole is this kind of big thing and small thing coming together. And people think if you're ever going to kind of solve all of physics together, it's through understanding black holes. Now, at the center of a black hole, we say that there's some singularity. And, uh, we all also say kind of at the beginning of the universe, kind of before the universe started, maybe there's like a singularity. So there is absolutely kind of common themes, whether

• 18:25Speaker 02

  A black hole itself can kind of start another universe? I'm not so sure, but I think the the answers kind of of how to understand the universe can be reasonably found possibly by understanding black holes themselves.

• 18:37Ira Flatow?

  Mm hmm. All right. Thank you. Hope that explains something. I want to move on to something quite similar, but quite different. And that is that I've been reading that scientists of Cal at Caltech are reporting they have found all the missing visible matter in the universe. There was they said that 76% of the universe's normal matter lies in the space between galaxies. I mean, is that important that they found that?

• 19:03Speaker 02

  It it is great that they found it. I'd still say that that visible matter is part of the 4%.

• 19:11Ira Flatow?

  Right.

• 19:11Speaker 02

  So definitely kudos to them, but but we still have 96 or 95% we're working on. So but but good to shore up the stuff that we can see.

• 19:19Ira Flatow?

  Okay.

• 19:20Flora Lichtman?

  Dan, tell me about the Verarubin Observatory. It's in Chile. It's up and running. What is it measuring? What are you looking forward to?

• 19:28Speaker 02

  Right. So Verarubin Observatory is the instrument that that our whole community rallied around in what we call the decadal process. Basically, the the instrument that we all said it kind of there could be one instrument in astronomy, this would be it. And it is a huge telescope, eight eight meters with this huge field of view. It's about a camera that's like 1,000 times bigger than a normal camera that we're used to. It's the most number of pixels of any camera that's ever been built. And it will do all sorts of different science and astronomy. So it's trying to find Planet Nine. A lot of scientists think that there's another planet in our solar system. That's not that's not Pluto. It's this other planet.

• 20:10Speaker 02

  It'll be able to find asteroids coming from other solar systems. So some people, when we've seen one before, thought, maybe there's aliens on that asteroid. But we're going to start finding a lot of these asteroids. And then it will find or really try to figure out what are this this dark energy problem and dark matter problem.

• 20:28Flora Lichtman?

  You think it will it will it will help with some of these big questions that we've been talking about?

• 20:32Speaker 02

  Absolutely. And it's optimized to try to solve all these things.

• 20:37Flora Lichtman?

  Tell us a little bit about who Vera Rubin was and what she's known for.

• 20:41Speaker 02

  Right. So Vera Rubin is often credited with discovering dark matter. So what she was looking at is how light goes around galaxies. And she noticed that unlike with our solar system where something far away moves around, it's centered slower. She noticed things further from the center of the galaxy actually are moving pretty fast. And she was able to deduce that there's this extra matter throughout the galaxy that we're not seeing. And this is a pretty profound discovery that we now know is about 25% of the universe. And one thing that the observatory, in her namesake, is trying to do is figure out what exactly

• 21:25Speaker 02

  this dark matter is. She was really the pioneer of both the observing side and figuring out, hey, there's something else here in the universe.

• 21:32Ira Flatow?

  Got Wendy Freed been back on the phone with us, professor of astronomy and astrophysics at University of Chicago. We were talking about the new Vera Rubin Telescope. Are you excited by that also?

• 21:42Speaker 03

  Enormously excited. I think it's going to give us a view of the universe we haven't had before in the sense that not only will it go deep and cover a large area of the sky, but it will also tell us over time how things are changing. So it's a unique new instrument. Very excited. And it opened to everyone, open access. So I think we're going to learn a lot.

• 22:06Ira Flatow?

  I understand there's a global watch party, first watch party on Monday, and people can look for that. Here is how you go to see it, rubinobservatory.org, or you can look for their YouTube channel. We'll put it in a link on our website so everybody can see it. Let's go to the phones, to Leesburg, Florida. Hi, Logan. Hi, Logan. Are you there?

• 22:31Ira Flatow?

  Logan? No? Sorry. Yeah, maybe we'll get him back.

• 22:38Flora Lichtman?

  How about to Ted in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania?

• 22:42Ira Flatow?

  Hi Ted.

• 22:44Speaker 08

  Hello, how are you?

• 22:45Ira Flatow?

  Hey there, go ahead.

• 22:47Speaker 08

  Hey, I love your show most of the time.

• 22:49Ira Flatow?

  Oh.

• 22:49Speaker 08

  This kind of stuff just absolutely fries my brain because I've never heard any of this stuff discussed sort of under the umbrella or in the context of infinity and infinite space. So if everything just keeps going on and on and on and on as many times as you want to say and on, then what the heck are you guys talking about?

• 23:18Ira Flatow?

  Dan, infinity is not what most people think it is, is it?

• 23:23Speaker 02

  Right, so in astronomy typically we put some ground rules on. When we talk about the universe, we say that's really just the observable universe. There's limits to how far we can see based on how old the universe is and how the distance that light could travel in the time of the universe. Now what's beyond the universe, it may go on infinitely, we do not know, but we say that's kind of outside the realm of what we can measure and our work ends before there.

• 23:55Ira Flatow?

  Well, I'm glad we're frying somebody's brain here because my hair hurts all the time when I talk about it and I enjoy talking about it. So we go to the phones again. Let's see if we can go. Let's go to, maybe go to Blackwell in Chattanooga. Hi, welcome to Science Friday.

• 24:10Speaker 09

  Hello, good to hear you.

• 24:14Ira Flatow?

  Is your hair been, is your hair gone fire today?

• 24:16Speaker 09

  Oh, not at all, really. So my question is, if the Big Bang represents one unit of energy...

• 24:28Speaker 09

  Okay, and one unit of mass, where is centropy? Point being, if the constants that we perceive as Newtonian and Einsteinian physics are constant, then the acceleration of the universe, regardless of dark matter, white matter, whatever, the acceleration of the universe would seem to be maintaining that constant that we observe in the organization of planets, galaxies, stars, what have you, because it's losing energy.

• 25:05Ira Flatow?

  You're talking about the, you're saying about the conservation of energy going on here?

• 25:10Speaker 09

  No, that's entropy, the loss of energy.

• 25:11Ira Flatow?

  Hmm, so what's your question? Do you have one?

• 25:16Speaker 09

  If we, if we start with one unit of energy and one unit of mass, okay, well, that energy dissipates, right? That's centropy. Okay, so, it, would you consider, would, does it make sense that the continued acceleration of the perceived universe accomplishes

• 25:41Ira Flatow?

  Hmm.

• 25:42Speaker 09

  the constant observation of Newtonian and Einsteinian physics?

• 25:48Ira Flatow?

  Okay, let me get that question. Wendy, do you have an answer there?

• 25:52Speaker 03

  So, uh, what general relativity allows, unlike, uh, Newtonian gravity, for example, i- is this repulsive form of gravity that we term dark energy. And, uh, the, in, you know, the simplest explanation for this dark energy is that it's a cosmological constant, and that, um, that energy, uh, i- in the dark, form of dark energy is, is a constant in, in time. And now, so, and, you know, these different models allow for, um...

• 26:28Speaker 03

  Different values, including we had to explain a universe where the cosmological constant was zero early on. So we don't have a theoretical explanation right now for what could be causing this change as a function of time or the function of redshift in the dark energy. So what I would say at this point is we don't have a good theory for what could be causing this. But right now, it's an empirical measurement. We are seeing evidence at some level of precision that the dark energy is evolving as a function of time. And so what will account for that ultimately? We would need a fundamental physical theory to do that, and we don't have that at the current time.

• 27:10Speaker 03

  But what I would come back to is that this is allowed within general relativity, it's all consistent, and it's up to us now to improve our measurements and actually determine what is happening in the evolution of the universe.

• 27:24Flora Lichtman?

  Dan, Wendy, I mean, hearing you talk, you've both said it's an exciting time. I mean, does it really feel like, wow, what a time to be alive for you in your world?

• 27:35Speaker 03

  Absolutely. We have these marvelous facilities now. I mean, the James Webb Space Telescope with its incredible resolution and sensitivity to allow us to make measurements of distances where we've never had this opportunity before. Starting with the Rubin Telescope now that's going to do this survey of unprecedented depth and sensitivity. A new NASA satellite, the Roman Space Telescope satellite, and these measurements of the baryon acoustic oscillations that are telling us about the potential change in dark energy along with supernovae. So the opportunities now to make these measurements have never been greater. So yes, it's an enormously exciting time.

• 28:19Ira Flatow?

  Dan, you too?

• 28:20Speaker 02

  Yeah, and I'll just add that for all the instruments that Wendy discussed, they've been planned and worked on for almost 20 years, a number of them. So we've been waiting and working on these for a really long time, and it just so happens that a bunch of these, kind of all the things we've been waiting for are coming online last year, this year, next year.

• 28:41Flora Lichtman?

  Are they threatened by federal funding cuts?

• 28:43Speaker 03

  We hope not.

• 28:47Speaker 02

  Yeah, I'd say like for the the Roman Space Telescope, it's it's it's possible that it will not get as much funding as needed to launch next year. That's that's still being figured out. But I mean, I would just say that we've worked kind of really hard. We're at the near the finish line for a number of these things. So I think it wouldn't be worth it to kind of not push across the finish line right now.

• 29:10Ira Flatow?

  Would you think that we're going to have a unification of quantum mechanics and general relativity anytime soon?

• 29:16Speaker 03

  It's just a serious dream. And, you know, whether this is 22nd century physics dropped into the 20th and 21st centuries, I think we can't predict that. But certainly the hope is there.

• 29:30Ira Flatow?

  Dan, do we need a new discovery of something that will unite the two?

• 29:34Speaker 02

  Yeah, I yeah, or a someone that could that could come in and you just kind of figure this this all out. So for now, I think what we can do is just kind of keep measuring the universe, seeing what fits and what doesn't until someone can kind of figure out how it all makes sense.

• 29:51Ira Flatow?

  Are there up and coming geniuses on the horizon?

• 29:54Speaker 02

  Maybe they're

• 29:55Speaker 03

  Maybe they're listening.

• 29:56Speaker 02

  Yeah, they're listening right now.

• 29:57Ira Flatow?

  Well, we we hope they are. And I want to thank both of you for taking time to be with us today. Wendy Friedman, professor of astronomy and astrophysics at the University of Chicago. Dan Skolnick, associate professor of physics at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina. Good luck to both of you in your quest.

• 30:15Speaker 02

  Thank you so much.

• 30:16Speaker 03

  Thank you very much.

• 30:17Ira Flatow?

  And that's about all the time we have. A lot of people helped make this show happen.

• 30:22Speaker 02

  Santiago Flores. Dee Peterschmidt.

• 30:25Speaker 05

  Melissa Mares. Emma Gomez. Jackie Hirschfeld.

• 30:29Ira Flatow?

  I'm Ira Flatow. We'll see you soon.