Hubble Constant Quotes

If the rate of expansion one second after the Big Bang had been smaller by even one part in a hundred thousand million million, it would have recollapsed before it reached its present size. On the other hand, if it had been greater by a part in a million, the universe would have expanded too rapidly for stars and planets to form.

Dark energy is incredibly strange, but actually it makes sense to me that it went unnoticed, because dark energy has no effect on daily life, or even inside our solar system.

I am deeply impressed with the way dark matter has explained cosmological observations.

One of the most exciting things about dark energy is that it seems to live at the very nexus of two of our most successful theories of physics: quantum mechanics, which explains the physics of the small, and Einstein's Theory of General Relativity, which explains the physics of the large, including gravity.

As soon as the idea of the Big Bang was proposed in the 1920s, astronomers set about trying to work out when the bang happened. Initial estimates were, not surprisingly, wildly inaccurate, but by the 1980s it was known that the universe was 15 billion years old, give or take 5 billion years.

It seemed like my favourite kind of job - a wonderful chance to ask something absolutely fundamental: the fate of the Universe and whether the Universe was infinite or not.

Radio Astronomy has added greatly to our understanding of the structure and dynamics of the universe. The cosmic microwave background radiation, considered a relic of the explosion at the beginning of the universe some 18 billion years ago, is one of the most powerful aids in determining these features of the universe.

The original project began because we know the universe is expanding. Everybody had assumed that gravity would slow down the expansion of the universe and everything would come to a halt and collapse. The big surprise was it was actually speeding up.

We've known for a long time that the universe is expanding. But about 15 years ago, my colleagues and I discovered that it is expanding faster and faster. That is, the universe is accelerating, and that was not expected, but it is now attributed to this mysterious stuff called dark energy which seems to make up about 70 percent of the universe.

For almost a century, the Universe has been known to be expanding as a consequence of the Big Bang about 14 billion years ago. However, the discovery that this expansion is accelerating is astounding. If the expansion will continue to speed up, the Universe will end in ice.

They say the universe is expanding. That should help with the traffic.

Until the 1990s, there were few reliable observations about movement at the scale of the entire universe, which is the only scale dark energy effects. So dark energy could not be seen until we could measure things very, very far away.

I've been working in cosmology since 1964.

One of the great challenges of modern cosmology is to discover what the geometry of the universe really is.

There are at least as many galaxies in our observable universe as there are stars in our galaxy.

We look at distant exploding stars called supernovae, and we've developed techniques to measure how far away they are and how fast they're moving away from us.

If you consider the universe one second after the Big Bang, the expansion rate would have to have been just right to an accuracy of 15 decimal places, or else the universe would really not work.

Astronomers still can't decide what the shape of our universe is. Is it closed and finite, which is to say, is there a countable tally of all the galaxies that exist, even beyond the ones we can see? Or is it infinite? The latter possibility is still on the table.

My thesis project was to identify quasars, which are very distant, very energetic objects and still quite mysterious.

The age of the universe is not just 'a guess', but rather it is a carefully measured number that is now known to a high degree of accuracy.

Eventually, when the universe expands enough, all that will be left is the dark energy.

The existence of dark matter and dark energy are inferred from observations! They are not theoretical constructs. Though invisible, both reveal their presence through the effects that they exert on motions of celestial bodies and in the case of dark matter - the bending of light as well.

We already have a pretty good knowledge of the universe's mass-energy content, so if we can get a handle on its geometry, then we will be able to work out exactly what the fate of the universe will be.

Astronomers can look back in time. We can look at things as they used to be. We have an idea there was a Big Bang explosion 13.7 billion years ago. We have a story of how galaxies and stars were made. It's an amazing story.

The dark energy is not exactly zero, but the first 122 decimal points are zero. That's crazy. That is really one of the craziest things we've ever discovered.