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posted by chromas on Wednesday January 23 2019, @01:31PM   Printer-friendly
from the H0LiCOW dept.

Seeing double could help resolve dispute about how fast the universe is expanding

The question of how quickly the universe is expanding has been bugging astronomers for almost a century. Different studies keep coming up with different answers — which has some researchers wondering if they've overlooked a key mechanism in the machinery that drives the cosmos.

[...] At the heart of the dispute is the Hubble constant, a number that relates distances to the redshifts of galaxies — the amount that light is stretched as it travels to Earth through the expanding universe. Estimates for the Hubble constant range from about 67 to 73 kilometers per second per megaparsec, meaning that two points in space 1 megaparsec apart (the equivalent of 3.26 million light-years) are racing away from each other at a speed between 67 and 73 kilometers per second.

[...] [Scientists] chose one specific subset of quasars — those whose light has been bent by the gravity of an intervening galaxy, which produces two side-by-side images of the quasar on the sky.

Light from the two images takes different routes to Earth. When the quasar's brightness fluctuates, the two images flicker one after another, rather than at the same time. The delay in time between those two flickers, along with information about the meddling galaxy's gravitational field, can be used to trace the light's journey and deduce the distances from Earth to both the quasar and the foreground galaxy. Knowing the redshifts of the quasar and galaxy enabled the scientists to estimate how quickly the universe is expanding.

[...] The UCLA-led team came up with an estimate for the Hubble constant of about 72.5 kilometers per second per megaparsec, a figure in line with what other scientists had determined in research that used distances to supernovas — exploding stars in remote galaxies — as the key measurement. However, both estimates are about 8 percent higher than one that relies on a faint glow from all over the sky called the cosmic microwave background, a relic from 380,000 years after the Big Bang, when light traveled freely through space for the first time.

H0LiCOW - IX. Cosmographic analysis of the doubly imaged quasar SDSS 1206+4332 and a new measurement of the Hubble constant (DOI: 10.1093/mnras/stz200) (DX)


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  • (Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 23 2019, @02:00PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 23 2019, @02:00PM (#790592)

    Xonotic vs ChaosEsque:Anthology, Which to chose. A debate on OpenSource FPS's

    >Xonotic over ChaosEsqueAnthology:
    ..................................
    Ayyo. Before you make a big mistake in choosing a project or sum shit you gotta be feeling the ways of the both the people. You feel me?

    M'fcking Xonotic and dis bullshit is diffrens.

    Xonotic devs deeply respect women and their rights and privileges.

    Dis Bullshit devs hate women's rights and have been harranging FLOSS femininists fo like a decade. (Citation: http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/MikeeUSA [wikia.com] )

    Xonotic Developers contribute to society by working real jobs.

    Dis Bullshit is a pack of fucking NEETs who say dey ain't workin fo no enemy.

    Xonotic Programmers are attracted to real Women.

    Dis BULLSHIT faggots want to take little girls as brides.

    Xonotic Men respect and uphold modern ethical understandings and beliefs.

    DIS BULLSHIT NEET FUCKS worship the war god of the jews and cite "deuteronomy" as reason why raping young female children into marraige is "awwwite" (Example: "Deuteronomy 22, 28-29,hebrew, see na'ar, tahpas bla bla bla bla" -- These words are all spam-filtered on soylentnews.org for a reason)

    Xonotic Paragons have a correct work:life:hobby balance and deeply love real women.

    Dis_Bullshit neet faggots do not work, do not life, they just program the videogame and make maps for it. They hate women and like little girls (and we all know that little girls are basically boys).

    Choose wisely for you will be judged by the company you keep.

    If you want to get fired from your job: fine: shack up with mikeeeusa and the faggot neets of Dis Bullshit and their mountain of shit. You know: if you like pedophiles and guns so much. Also the neet assholes added disgusting things like working torture chambers into the game. Do you honestly want to be associated with that?
    ..................................

    >CEA over Xonotic:
    ..................................

    Some things to consider:

    Chaos-Esque Anthology has little things coded in over the years like:
    Bullet Deceleration in Water (along with trails) (thus you can use water for cover like in real life)
    Blood splatter on walls when bullets pass through players (noticed Unreal 97 had this, and Xonotic didn't, so it was coded in).
    and various other little niggling details that were noticed as absent and programmed in over the years.

    It also has big things like the tons of added weapons, and all the rest that has allready been mentioned.

    Xonotic itself could be prone to puritanism: one of the devs wanted to strip out all the player models and replace them with only robots so it is "less violent" (don't think they did it, but it was discussed).
    Chaos-Esque doesn't entertain such thoughts.

    Xonotic has code churn from time to time when a dev decides to refactor everything in the "right way". Samual did this once, and later some new guys refactored the whole thing again.
    Chaos-Esque does not do this. It refines the codebase it has. The machine doesn't care how asthetic ones quakec dialect appears to humans.
    (Rewriting codebases for no reason can reintroduce long banished bugs).

    You can think of Xonotic as american-christianity: subject to bouts of shakerism and other fads,
    while Chaos-Esque Anthology is more listening to the voices of antiquity.

    Chaos-Esque Anthology believes in slow, steady, methodical advancement. Like a large gear biting into whatever it is biting into.
    Xonotic is more of a ... talk about things... some bouts of revolutionary change... some iconoclasm... and churn in developers.

    Chaos-Esque Anthology has one developer. Who listens to no one, who no one talks to.

    One of these projects makes more progress than the other.

    Now, on the otherhand: Xonotic has a ... (close eyes, savor the moment, breathe in, breathe out)...
    Xonotic has a Community.

    You can go to Xonotic. You can approach it. You can Talk to it.
    There are people you can say hey what is up, how be ist.
    You can talk about new features you want, discuss enacting them, have arguments about it.

    You cannot do this with Chaos-Esque. I mean, you can talk to a wall.
    On the other hand, whatever feature you want in your heart... it has a good chance of simply appearing in Chaos-Esque.
    The development model is: force of will. You will it. That desire is tranferred to the heart of the developer. He has the desire to suddenly implement a new feature. That feature is willed into existance.
    Many people scoff at this development model saying that it lacks _Communication_, however Chaos-Esque has 185 weapons and Xonotic has 18. Many people go on the Xonotic forum, make a feature request... and unbeknonst to them Chaos-Esque has had this thing for many years (they will never know).

    Note: Xonotic (and ofcourse Chaos-Esque) has a way of seperating game types. You could do ./xonotic-executable -game vanilla, and ./xonotic-chaos-esque executable -game chaos
    ...................

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