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The red line is the path of a light beam emitted by the quasar about 13 billion years ago and reaching Earth at the present day. The orange line shows the present-day distance between the quasar and Earth, about 28 billion light-years, which is a larger distance than the age of the universe multiplied by the speed of light, ct.
The accelerated expansion of the universe is thought to have begun since the universe entered its dark-energy-dominated era roughly 5 billion years ago. [ 8 ] [ notes 1 ] Within the framework of general relativity , an accelerated expansion can be accounted for by a positive value of the cosmological constant Λ , equivalent to the presence of ...
The thinning of matter over time reduces the ability of gravity to decelerate the expansion of the universe; in contrast, dark energy (believed to be a constant scalar field throughout the visible universe) is a constant factor tending to accelerate the expansion of the universe. The universe's expansion passed an inflection point about five or ...
It represents the boundary between the observable and the unobservable regions of the universe, so its distance at the present epoch defines the size of the observable universe. Due to the expansion of the universe, it is not simply the age of the universe times the speed of light, as in the Hubble horizon, but rather the speed of light ...
1672 – Jean Richer and Giovanni Domenico Cassini measure the Earth-Sun distance, the astronomical unit, to be about 138,370,000 km. [67] Later it will be refined by others up to the current value of 149,597,870 km. 1675 – Ole Rømer uses the orbital mechanics of Jupiter's moons to estimate that the speed of light is about 227,000 km/s. [68]
1810 – François Arago observes that the speed of light of stars – measured with stellar aberration – may be independent of the relative motion of stars and the Earth; or at least, no differences are observable with a naked eye. [4] 1818 – Augustin-Jean Fresnel proposes his model of partial aether dragging to explain Arago’s finding. [5]
The light-travel distance to the edge of the observable universe is the age of the universe times the speed of light, 13.8 billion light years. This is the distance that a photon emitted shortly after the Big Bang, such as one from the cosmic microwave background , has traveled to reach observers on Earth.
Even light itself does not have a "velocity" of c in this sense; the total velocity of any object can be expressed as the sum = + where is the recession velocity due to the expansion of the universe (the velocity given by Hubble's law) and is the "peculiar velocity" measured by local observers (with = ˙ () and = ˙ (), the dots indicating a ...