A report published in The Astrophysical Journal has confirmed significant discrepancies between two different methods used to estimate the universe’s expansion rate.
The new report reveals that about 5% of the universe consists of ordinary matter, while the remaining portion is composed of dark matter and dark energy. The nature of both dark matter and dark energy remains a mystery.
A photograph capturing a superluminous supernova explosion. NASA.
According to the report, dark energy, believed to be responsible for the universe’s accelerating expansion, makes up 66.2% of the universe. The remaining 33.8% is a combination of ordinary matter and dark matter.
To derive the most accurate conclusions about the universe’s structure to date, an international team of experts observed superluminous supernovae. They analyzed the light emitted by over 1,550 different superluminous supernovae, ranging from distances closer to Earth to as far as 10 billion years ago.
“We can compare and witness how the universe behaves and evolves over time,” said Dillon Brout, the leader of the Pantheon+ project at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA.
Brout’s team aimed to provide the most precise measurements of the universe’s structure through the Pantheon+ project. They analyzed data collected over two decades of observing the universe by experts worldwide.
The Pantheon+ team estimated that the universe is expanding at a rate of 73.4 kilometers per megaparsec, equivalent to 3.26 million light-years per year or approximately 255,000 kilometers per hour, according to the announcement from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.
However, this figure differs from previous estimates obtained using cosmic microwave background radiation, which is electromagnetic radiation generated about 300,000 years after the Big Bang.
These measurements indicate a rate of about 67 kilometers per megaparsec, significantly slower than the latest measurement results.