New Big Bang Experiment Sends Schockwaves Through Physics!!!
New findings show that the Universe is Accelerating! Scientists at Kitt Peak, and other observatories, performed experiments using "Type Ia Supernova" as standard distance indicators and their results showed that our universe is not only expanding, but accelerating!!! A little history- Before the 1920's, Astronomers thought that the universe was static. Then Edwin Hubble turned the astronomical community upside down when he found that virtually all galaxies were moving away from us, and each other. If we think in reverse, and play this expansion backwards, everything in the universe must have been much closer and hotter in the distant past. This brought about the "Big Bang Theory" which has been tested and shows that our universe is ~12 to 15 billion years old. Much theoritical work was done and we believe the universe started out as a point less than the size of an atom!!! In the first fraction of a fraction of a second, it grew by a million trillion trillion times to the size of a grapefruit through a process that became to be known as inflation. Then at some point in time matter and anti-matter condensed out of this super heated inflated piece of fruit (Ha Ha) Please see the first "Big Bang Experiment....." article in the New Discoveries section for the matter anti-matter fight. After matter won out, there was a dark period until the first stars formed then collected into galaxies and clusters of galaxies and so on. Now we find ourselves with this New Big Bang Problem. If we measure the brightness of a candle 1 ft away then measure it at two ft, double the distance, we find it is only 1/4 as bright or a 1/r2 relatioships like gravity. Why include gravity? Well, if there is enough matter (stuff) in the universe, its expansion should be slowing down by gravities pull. We can only find ~1/3 of the matter (this includes dark matter and exotic particles) to halt the expansion and make a "Big Crunch" back to a point again. So What? Not only is our universe failing to make a big crunch, but it seems to be accelerating!!!!! Think of space going through another inflationary period. Now the candle. Astronomers use objects with a known brightness to measure the gigantic distances throughout our universe. Stars called Cepheid variables are one of the "Standard Candles" used. These are good out to our neighbor galaxy Andromeda. The type Ia Supernova shine as bright as its entire galaxy and we can tell they are alike by their spectra Click Here so they are good distance indicators as far as we can see galaxies. Now here is a problem. These supernova tell us that the universe is only ~ 9 Billion years old while we know of stars that are ~12 billion. How can a star be older than our universe??? Please send any comments or ideas to us at Easy Science.
Here is a little of the Matter Anti-Matter "New Discoveries Article."
Asymmetry seems to favor the production of Matter. When the early Matter and Antimatter condensed out of the high energy flux, the asymmetry of some particle/anti-particle interactions favored the production of matter. More high energy experiments need to be done before scientists learn why this asymmetry exists. In 1964 scientists found that K mesons and anti-K mesons transformed into other particles in a similar asymmetric fashion. It is very difficult to perform these experiments because the fraction of asymmetric particles is so small. It took only a very, very small difference in the production of Matter over Antimatter to cause the whole universe to come into being!!! Keep your eyes open, along with your minds, to see this make ripples through the world of Physics.