In the Dark

A short comment piece by Wendy Freedman has appeared in Nature Astronomy; there’s a free version on the arXiv here. It gives a nice perspective on the current debate about the value of the Hubble constant from the point of view of an expert on cosmological distance scale measurements.

The abstract is here:

We are at an interesting juncture in cosmology. With new methods and technology, the accuracy in measurement of the Hubble constant has vastly improved, but a recent tension has arisen that is either signaling new physics or as-yet unrecognized uncertainties.

For the record, I’d go for `as-yet unrecognized uncertainties’, primarily because this field has a long history of drastically underestimated error-bars!

However, the publication of this piece gives me the excuse to resurrect the following poll, in which I invite you to participate:

This entry was posted on June 13, 2017 at 11:39 am and is filed under The Universe and Stuff with tags cosmological distance scale, Cosmology, Hubble constant, Wendy Freedman. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.