Adam Riess was 27 years old when he began the work that earned him the Nobel Prize in Physics, and just 41 when he received it. Earlier this year, Riess, who is now in his early 50s, pulled a graph-paper notebook off a bookshelf in his office at Johns Hopkins University so that I could see the yellowing page on which he’d made his famous calculations. He told me how these pen scratches led to a new theory of the universe. And then he told me why he now thinks that theory might be wrong.

 

THE NOBEL PRIZE WINNER WHO THINKS WE HAVE THE UNIVERSE ALL WRONG

 

By Ross Andersen

 

For nearly a century, astronomers have known that the universe is expanding, because the galaxies that we can see around us through telescopes are all rushing away. Riess studied how they moved. He very carefully measured the distance of each one from Earth, and when all the data came together, in 1998, the results surprised him. They were “shocking even,” he told his colleagues in a flustered email that he sent on the eve of his honeymoon. A striking relationship had emerged: The farther away that galaxies were, the faster they were receding. This “immediately suggested a profound conclusion,” he said in his Nobel Prize lecture. Something is causing the expansion of the universe to accelerate.

Riess’s genius lies in making precise observations, but the task of explaining the accelerating expansion that he discovered fell to theorists. They proposed the existence of dark energy: a faint, repulsive force that pervades all of empty space. The amount of dark energy that fits inside your bedroom, say, isn’t very strong. It won’t blow the walls out. But when dark energy’s power sums across truly cosmic volumes of space, it can drive galaxy clusters apart. And as this process puts more space between those galaxies, the repulsive force only strengthens, speeding up the expansion of the universe. Telescopes can see hundreds of billions of galaxies today, but trillions upon trillions of years from now, dark energy will have driven them all out of sight. Eventually, it will dilute every last bit of matter and energy into a cold equilibrium, a thin gruel of nothingness.

READ MORE:  https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2025/05/adam-riess-hubble-tension/682980/ ======================== Adam Guy Riess (born December 16, 1969) is an American astrophysicist and Bloomberg Distinguished Professor at Johns Hopkins University and the Space Telescope Science Institute. He is known for his research in using supernovae as cosmological probes. Riess shared both the 2006 Shaw Prize in Astronomy and the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics with Saul Perlmutter and Brian P. Schmidt for providing evidence that the expansion of the universe is accelerating.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adam_Riess?ysclid=mbbbx5zs3m188415368  ========================  

Hubble's law, also known as the Hubble–Lemaître law,[1]is the observation in physical cosmology that galaxies are moving away from Earth at speeds proportional to their distance. In other words, the farther a galaxy is from the Earth, the faster it moves away. A galaxy's recessional velocity is typically determined by measuring its redshift, a shift in the frequency of light emitted by the galaxy.

The discovery of Hubble's law is attributed to work published by Edwin Hubble in 1929,[2][3][4] but the notion of the universe expanding at a calculable rate was first derived from general relativity equations in 1922 by Alexander Friedmann. The Friedmann equations showed the universe might be expanding, and presented the expansion speed if that were the case.[5] Before Hubble, astronomer Carl Wilhelm Wirtz had, in 1922[6] and 1924,[7]deduced with his own data that galaxies that appeared smaller and dimmer had larger redshifts and thus that more distant galaxies recede faster from the observer. In 1927, Georges Lemaître concluded that the universe might be expanding by noting the proportionality of the recessional velocity of distant bodies to their respective distances. He estimated a value for this ratio, which—after Hubble confirmed cosmic expansion and determined a more precise value for it two years later—became known as the Hubble constant.[8][9][10][11][12] Hubble inferred the recession velocity of the objects from their redshifts, many of which were earlier measured and related to velocity by Vesto Slipher in 1917.[13][14][15] Combining Slipher's velocities with Henrietta Swan Leavitt's intergalactic distance calculations and methodology allowed Hubble to better calculate an expansion rate for the universe.[16]

Hubble's law is considered the first observational basis for the expansion of the universe, and is one of the pieces of evidence most often cited in support of the Big Bang model.[8][17] The motion of astronomical objects due solely to this expansion is known as the Hubble flow.[18] It is described by the equation v = H0D, with H0 the constant of proportionality—the Hubble constant—between the "proper distance" D to a galaxy (which can change over time, unlike the comoving distance) and its speed of separation v, i.e. the derivative of proper distance with respect to the cosmic time coordinate.[a] Though the Hubble constant H0 is constant at any given moment in time, the Hubble parameter H, of which the Hubble constant is the current value, varies with time, so the term constant is sometimes thought of as somewhat of a misnomer.[19][20]

The Hubble constant is most frequently quoted in km/s/Mpc, which gives the speed of a galaxy 1 megaparsec (3.09×1019 km) away as 70 km/s. Simplifying the units of the generalized form reveals that H0 specifies a frequency (SI unit: s−1), leading the reciprocal of H0 to be known as the Hubble time (14.4 billion years). The Hubble constant can also be stated as a relative rate of expansion. In this form H0 = 7%/Gyr, meaning that, at the current rate of expansion, it takes one billion years for an unbound structure to grow by 7%.

READ MORE: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hubble%27s_law

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