Hubble Tension Reviewed
Just a quick post to pass on a reference to a paper on arXiv (to appear in Annual Reviews of Astronomy and Astrophysics) about the ongoing saga of the Hubble Tension. The authors are Licia Verde, Nils Schöneberg, and Héctor Gil-Marín, three members of the ICCUB which is hosting me during my sabbatical. I saw an earlier draft of this paper but didn’t want to blog about it before the final version appeared. The abstract (which I’ve slightly reformatted) reads:
The Hubble parameter H0, is not a univocally-defined quantity: it relates redshifts to distances in the near Universe, but is also a key parameter of the ΛCDM standard cosmological model. As such, H0 affects several physical processes at different cosmic epochs, and multiple observables. We have counted more than a dozen H0‘s which are expected to agree if a) there are no significant systematics in the data and their interpretation and b) the adopted cosmological model is correct. With few exceptions (proverbially confirming the rule) these determinations do not agree at high statistical significance; their values cluster around two camps: the low (68 km/s/Mpc) and high (73 km/s/Mpc) camp. It appears to be a matter of anchors: the shape of the Universe expansion history agrees with the model, it is the normalizations that disagree. Beyond systematics in the data/analysis, if the model is incorrect there are only two viable ways to “fix” it: by changing the early time (z≳1100) physics and thus the early time normalization, or by a global modification, possibly touching the model’s fundamental assumptions (e.g., homogeneity, isotropy, gravity). None of these three options has the consensus of the community. The research community has been actively looking for deviations from ΛCDM for two decades; the one we might have found makes us wish we could put the genie back in the bottle.
arXiv:2311.13305
You can read the full paper here to learn about the scientific arguments, but I’d like to draw attention to this excerpt which is of more general relevance and with which I agree wholeheartedly:
It is also fair to say that the developments of the last decade have changed the expectations and modus operandi of a big part of the community. The community now expects results to be reproducible, hence the data and key software to be publicly available in such a way that a practitioner not involved in the original analysis could still retrace and reproduce all important steps and findings. While research areas such as the CMB and large-scale structure made this transition to “open science” about two decades ago, this was not the case for other areas of extra-galactic astronomy, but this is now changing.
arXiv:2311.13305
In the Dark 
November 24, 2023 at 2:34 pm
Its now a rule for UKRI grants – you must have a data management plan and ensure that all data relevant to a project are curated for a minimum of 10 years. As a consequence many HEIs, including mine, are spending considerable money on long-term storage. Particularly important for medical research, I’d imagine.
November 25, 2023 at 9:18 am
Hubble bubble, toil and trouble…
November 26, 2023 at 12:40 am
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November 28, 2023 at 11:20 am
That’s interesting I remember in early 90’s that large scale structure research was very fashionable with the Phd students at Queen Mary College. Of 40+ research students would guess well over half of them was in this subject. So at this time the observational data this studies were based on weren’t reproducible? A lot of the research was also very theoretical and didn’t matter too much. I also didn’t understand how accurate the data was, and if many models could fit the available data.
As was typical, I was listening in the background to discussions in the coffee room, barely understanding what was being talked about.