This theory explained that the positions of stars and equinoxes shifted over time, indicating that the Earth’s axis of rotation was slowly wobbling. Hipparchus of Nicea was an ancient Greek astronomer and mathematician living in the 2nd century BCE. He innovated observational techniques and introduced the concept of the magnitude system used to quantify the brightness of stars. While his philosophy is less known, his rigorous and systematic approach to scientific inquiry was most influential. Furthermore, Aristarchus attempted to estimate the sizes and distances of the Sun, Moon, and Earth. He suggested a method involving the measurement of angles during lunar eclipses to determine the relative distances and sizes of these celestial bodies.
The Beginnings of a Geometrical Cosmos: Anaximander
“I cannot see how science could be conducted on any other assumption than that of order an intelligibility in nature”– Copleston. “The physicists assure us that individual quantum transitions in atoms have no cause.” – Russell. If experience only shows that contingent beings exist, we can even question whether there actually is a ‘whole’. Experience shows that parts of the universe are contingent & have an explanation.
Read more about Cosmology here.
In short, everyone, including Nguyen and his co-authors, agree that their results are not definitive. “It’s useful to play these exercises,” says Nico Hamaus of the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich in Germany. The astronomers used this signal to estimate the amount and distribution of intervening matter along the lines of sight to various galaxy-rich regions across a large patch of the sky. In other words, they managed to measure matter’s cosmic density. COSMIC DISCOVERY. Robert Wilson and Arno Penzias unexpectedly discovered the cosmic microwave background radiation with this horn-shaped antenna. “These civilizations felt a connection between stars, the sun and the moon, the clouds in the sky,” Heller says. “Everything they saw around them, even the things they touched and used every day, they felt kinship with on some level—something often lost in our modern, post-Enlightenment world.”
James Webb Space Telescope reveals most distant Milky Way galaxy doppelganger
Despite decades of searching for them, however, no waves were seen—until September 2015. That was when the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory detected the first evidence of gravitational waves in the form of a “chirp”—a minute shaking of spacetime that speeds up and then dies away. In this case, it was caused by two black holes in a binary system that had started out orbiting each other but gradually spiraled together and eventually converged into a single massive hole. LIGO’s detectors consist of mirrors four kilometers apart whose separation is measured by laser beams that reflect light back and forth between them. A passing gravitational wave causes the space between the two mirrors to jitter by an amount millions of times as small as the diameter of a single atom—LIGO is indeed an amazing feat of precision engineering and perseverance. If the universe is flat, there must be an additional component making up 73% (in addition to the 23% dark matter and 4% baryons) of the energy density of the universe. In order not to interfere with Big Bang nucleosynthesis and the cosmic microwave background, it must not cluster in haloes like baryons and dark matter.
Both problems could signal that scientists are misunderstanding something big about physics, and a recent paper in the journal Physical Review Letters adds to the suspicion that this might be the case—for the S8 tension, at least. In the so-called standard model of cosmology, the universe started off almost but not quite uniformly dense. As the universe expanded, gravity, as described by Einstein’s general theory of relativity, amplified those variations to create the huge variations we see today in the form of clusters and superclusters of galaxies. That process is somewhat suppressed, however, by dark energy—the still mysterious force causing the expansion of the universe to accelerate rather than slow down—which pushes matter apart before the density variations can get even greater. Physical cosmology is the study of the observable universe’s origin, its large-scale structures and dynamics, and the ultimate fate of the universe, including the laws of science that govern these areas.
The spectra that it creates reveal granular details — chemical composition, temperature and mass — of individual stars, planets and galaxies. In the 1200s, the Maya made records of Venus’s position in the sky on paper made from fig-tree fiber. Hieroglyphics carved into their monuments feature three stones surrounding a fire, a cosmic hearth of creation. Today K’iche’ Maya people in Guatemala understand the constellation of Orion to include those three stones and the fire in the center to be the Orion Nebula. Two entirely different ways of “weighing” the cosmos are producing disparate results. If more precise measurements fail to resolve the discrepancy, physicists may have to revise the standard model of cosmology, our best description of the universe.
