Young universe was slow to expand, survey finds

Vasudevan Mukunth

Astronomers from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory have combined a new analytical technique with a massive data-set to deduce how fast the universe was expanding in its earlier years. Led by teams from the Berkeley Lab and the Centre de Saclay (France), they used the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (BOSS), a spectrograph used to observe how light of different frequencies is being absorbed and emitted by various objects in the universe. Commenting on the results, at 3 billion years old, spacetime itself was getting bigger by 1 per cent every 44 million years, said David Schlegel, an astronomer with the Berkeley Lab, in an email to this Correspondent. He is the principal investigator on BOSS. The result was announced at a high accuracy of 2.2 per cent. The conventional method has been to study how the frequency of light emitted by extremely bright objects called quasars is lowered as a natural consequence of the universes expansion. However, directly measuring it becomes difficult for those more than six billion lightyears away. So, the astronomers picked over 140,000 quasars from the BOSS data and studied how they illuminated intervening gas clouds. The hydrogen in them absorbs some of the light, casting a shadow that reveals its density and distance from the quasar. The Berkeley team, led by postdoctoral fellow Andreu Font-Ribera, compared the distribution of gas clouds with quasars, usually found at the centres of massive galaxies, to arrive at a cosmic map of distances. The team led by Timothe Delubac from Saclay focused on patterns in the hydrogen gas to measure the mass distribution in the young universe. Putting them together, the Berkeley Lab astronomers' results correspond to a 10.5-billion year old universe expanding at 68 km/s for every million light-years away from the observer which is lower than expected. Today, the rate is 67.15 km/s for every million parsec away from the observer (one parsec is 3.26 light-years), a value established in 2013 using the Planck space telescope.

In some theories of cosmology, the driver of the universe's accelerating expansion is a mysterious entity called dark energy. It accords the vacuum of space with some energy that resists the universe's implosion due to the gravitational pull of billions of galaxies. So, finding a young universe that expanded slowly puts constraints on the origins of dark energy. By studying the expansion we learn about how much matter and dark energy was present as a function of time. The higher the accuracy, the better the constraints, Mr. Font-Ribera wrote in an email. Mangalyaan crosses half-way mark
T.S. Subramanian

An artistic rendering of India's Mars Orbiter Mission crossing the mid-point of its path to Mars.
Courtesy: ISRO

Indias spacecraft to Mars today completed half the distance of its epic voyage to the Red Planet. At 9.50 a.m. on Wednesday, the Mars

Orbiter sailed past 34 crore km while the entire distance it has to cover on its curved path is 68 crore km. In other words, it has covered half the road distance in deep space towards its destination. This is a major milestone after our Mars spacecraft got out of the sphere of the influence of the Earth on December 4, 2013, said K. Radhakrishnan, Chairman, Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO). The spacecraft is on course towards Mars and is in good health, he said. Dr. Radhakrishnan added: The trajectory we have put the spacecraft in is looking to be good that we are not doing the Trajectory Correction Manoeuvre (TCM) scheduled for April. It means we have an understanding of the forces, such as the Sun and the planets, acting on the spacecraft. So the calculations we have done have proved to be all right. We are learning every day from the way we are managing the operations related to the spacecraft. On November 5, 2013, ISROs Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle (PSLVC25) put the Mars orbiter into its earth-orbit. On December 1, Mission Controllers fired the spacecrafts propulsion system called 440 Newton engine, the spacecraft was bolted out its earth-orbit and put into a Sun-centric orbit. On December 4, it got out of the sphere of influence (SOI) of the Earth and was truly on its way to Mars. ISRO has been continuously monitoring the Mars spacecraft using its Deep Space Network station at Byalalu village, near Bangalore, which is complemented by that of NASA-Jet Propulsion Laboratory, USA. Periodic tests are being done on the autonomy built into the orbiter, which (autonomy) enables it to take its own decisions for managing emergencies. At present, the radio distance between the spacecraft and the Earth is 39 million km. A signal from the Earth to the spacecraft and back to the Earth takes about four minutes and 15 seconds. According to A.S. Kiran Kumar, Director, Space Applications Centre (SAC), Ahmedabad, the Mars spacecraft is now speeding in deep space at seven lakh km a day.

The SAC built three out of the five instruments on board the orbiter to study the Mars atmosphere, mineralogy, presence of methane etc. Dr. Kiran Kumar added: The next major operation will be in June when we will do the TCM again (that is, the spacecrafts propulsion system will be fired to correct its trajectory). The TCM slated for April is not being done because there is no need for it. Things are going on smoothly. There will be three more TCMs, one each in June, August and September. The crucial day is on September 24 when the spacecraft will be injected into the Martian orbit. Long-billed vultures sighted in the Nilgiris
P. Oppili

Photo: Special ArrangementA

long-billed vulture in the Nilgiris. Photo: Special Arrangement

Long-billed vultures are found only in the north-eastern slopes of the Nilgiris

Wildlife officials and volunteers of Arulagam, a Coimbatore-based NGO involved in vulture conservation, sighted five long-billed vultures in the north-eastern slopes of the Nilgiris a few days ago.

Sharing the experience, S. Bharathidasan of Arulagam said his team received specific information about the presence of long-billed vultures in the area. It took more than two hours for the team to reach a cliff from where, using a binocular, it recorded the presence of the vultures on another cliff. Long-billed vultures are found only in the north-eastern slopes of the Nilgiris. White-backed, King and Egyptian vultures are the other three species found in the Nilgiris and the Moyar valley, its adjoining area, Mr. Bharathidasan said. Huge cattle population is found in the Nilgiris and its surrounding areas. This could be one of the reasons the vultures thrive here. Diclofenac, an anti-inflammatory drug used for both animals and humans, poses a major threat to the survival of vultures. Diclofenac-based drugs should be banned in the region, Mr. Bharathidasan said