Improvements in technical equipment and scientific knowledge mean that we can increasingly measure everything around us with more precision. And not only that, because according to the data announced at the last annual meeting of the American Astronomical Society, an international group of researchers has managed to measure with a precision of 1% the distance to galaxies located more than 6,000 million light years from the Earth . In other words, with unprecedented precision.
This new measurement much more accurate than the previous ones has been possible thanks to the data collected through the Baryons Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (BOSS). To obtain the data, BOSS has used the measurement of the periodic waves of the early universe that allow us to know the distribution of galaxies in the universe, the so-called Baryon Acoustic Oscillations (BAO). Basically, since the original size of these waves is known, its current measurement can be obtained to map the galaxies.
To get an idea of the importance and magnitude of this new measurement, it is necessary to understand what the degree of uncertainty is . Every measurement carries a degree of uncertainty that can be higher or lower and is expressed as a percentage. For example, if you measure the distance from Madrid to Barcelona (about 650 kilometers) with an error of 6.5 kilometers above or below, the precision would be 1%, while if the precision were less, for example, 10%, it would mean that we could get to be wrong in the measurement up to 65 kilometers.
As David Schlegel, principal investigator of the project and physicist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) points out, ” There are not many things in our daily lives that we know with an accuracy of 1% , now I know the size of the universe better than that of my home. “. In fact, in astronomy only a few clusters and a few hundred stars are close enough for the measured distances to have that precision.
The research also makes it possible to put new limits on the properties of ‘dark energy’, considered the cause of the accelerated expansion of the universe. Light from distant galaxies is distorted due to the expansion of the universe. Thanks to BOSS, by analyzing the remoteness of these galaxies, researchers are gaining new ways to understand ‘dark energy’.
Researchers from the UAM / CSIC Institute of Theoretical Physics have participated in the work presented at the annual meeting of the American Astronomical Society.
