Lecture 1
Lecture 1
Lecture 1
Lecture 1:
Fundamental observations: Hubble’s law and the scale factor.
Introduction:
Q: What were the most important physical laws and principles to advance the science of cosmology from the
beginning to the present state?
A: There were observations, and there was our growing understanding of the laws of physics that govern
the universe. In particular, our understanding of gravity has played a dominant role in supporting our
description of the universe. Our modern understanding of cosmology is based on the new theory of gravity:
General Relativity.
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L: Around 1900, the “Victorian universe”: the universe is our Galaxy, distances and velocities of stars were
being measured. The vision was of a static Newtonian universe of a finite Galaxy surrounded by infinite,
empty space.
L: Discovery of galaxies: nebulae had been known for long and catalogued by Messier, but it took time to
realise they belong to a very diverse set of objects. Some nebulae are gaseous clouds in our own Galaxy,
as proven by the first spectra that revealed emission-lines from excited atoms and ions. But what we
know today as galaxies have a continuum spectrum that arises from stars. Still, this was not clear in the
early twentieth century, when the issue of the nature of the “spiral nebulae” was being debated. Two
discoveries provided the essential proof that they were galaxies like the Milky Way: the period-luminosity
relation of Cepheids in the Magellanic Clouds by Henrietta Leavitt, and the discovery of Cepheid stars
and measurement of their periods in M31 by Edwin Hubble.
Q: What is flux f of a star? How do we calculate it from the luminosity L and distance d to a star?
L
f= . (1)
4πd2
Q: Once you know the period-luminosity relation, how was the distance to M31 known?
Answer: The key is to estimate the luminosity L by some means other than the flux f , in this case by
comparing to other Cepheids of known distance and using the period-luminosity relation. Then with the
known flux the distance r is obtained.
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L: Standard candles are objects where the luminosity is predicted from some other observation. A recent
useful example of this are Supernovae Type Ia. A relation of luminosity-duration is also used for SNIa to
estimate their luminosity by comparing to others.
Q: Could this universe of galaxies be infinite, both in space and in time? In other words, could the Universe
be infinite and have existed forever?
L: Olbers’ paradox: consider an infinite universe of stars. Let us measure the flux from each star.
Q: What is the contribution to the total intensity received from the sky, if there is a constant number density
n of stars?
L: Intensity (or surface brightness): Flux per unit solid angle (solid angle is measured in units of sterradian,
or square degrees, square arc seconds...).
df L nL
dI = ; df = n r2 dr dΩ = dr dΩ . (2)
dΩ 4πr2 4π
nL
dI = dr . (3)
4π
Q: So what is the total intensity? Each spherical shell of thickness dr contributes the same intensity. So the
total is infinite!
Q: Which of the above possible solutions can and cannot explain Olbers’ paradox?
L: Possibilities 1 to 4 do not work, because dust would eventually reemit any absorbed radiation and the sky
mean surface brightness is much darker than stars (like the Sun). Solution number 6 is the most important
one: it alone solves the problem even if the Universe is infinitely old (like in the Steady State model).
Solution number 5 is also relevant for the Big Bang model: we cannot see anything beyond a horizon
distance.
L: Final conclusion: the Universe cannot be static, infinitely large with a uniform population of stars or
galaxies, and infinitely old.
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Hubble’s Law
L: Hubble measured redshift and distances of several galaxies. Distances were measured with Cepheids using
their period-luminosity relation, and then other more luminous objects for more distant galaxies that
could be taken as roughly standard candles.
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L: Redshift: This measures how much the wavelength of an absorption or emission line in the spectrum of a
galaxy has been shifted owing to the velocity of the galaxy relative to us.
λob − λem
z= . (4)
λem
L: Vesto Slipher developped the technique to measure galaxy redshifts and noticed most galaxies are redshifted.
Very few galaxies (only a few among the most nearby ones) had blueshifts.
L: Hubble extended observations to many nearby galaxies, and he found a linear relation of distance and
redshift: Hubble’s law.
H0
z= r; v = H0 r . (5)
c
L: Hubble obtained the value H0 = 500 km s−1 Mpc−1 . However he had made several errors in the distances
due to wrong assumptions about standard candles, which were only corrected over a long period of time.
L: Current measurements using Cepheids, the maser in NGC4258 and Detached Eclipsing Binaries give H0 =
73.0 ± 1.0 km s−1 Mpc−1 (Riess et al. arxiv.org 1604.01424, 2307.15806), but other authors find a larger
error, H0 = 72 ± 2 km s−1 Mpc−1 (Uddin et al. arxiv.org 2308.01875). Measurements based on stars at
the Tip of the Red Giant Branch, W. Freedman et al. have given H0 = 69.9 ± 1.7 km s−1 Mpc−1 . There
is an on-going debate about the value of the Hubble constant and the discrepancy with values obtained
from alternative observations based on the early Universe and the Cosmic Microwave Background, which
give H0 = 67.4 ± 0.5 km s−1 Mpc−1 , but issues related to systematic errors are still unclear. Nevertheless,
at present the errors are much smaller than they were at the time of Hubble!
L: Hubble’s law implies that we can write the position of a galaxy relative to us at any time as: x(t) = a(t) r,
where r is the comoving coordinate, and a(t) is the scale factor, which is like the scale factor in any map,
which varies with time following the expansion of the Universe. In this way, all comoving coordinates of
every galaxy following Hubble’s law of expansion of the Universe can stay fixed, independent of time.
Important: The scale factor a(t) describes the expansion of the Universe, which is a stretching of space in
proportion to the scale factor.
L: Cosmological principle: the universe is homogeneous and isotropic on sufficiently large scales.
Q: If the expansion of the Universe is homogeneous and isotropic, what is the most general law relating velocity
to distance? It’s only Hubble’s law!
Important: Hubble’s law does not mean that we are at the center of an expansion of all the galaxies away
from us. Hubble’s law is observed the same way from any point. It is the only expansion law that is
compatible with a homogeneous and isotropic Universe.
L: Before Hubble’s discovery, Albert Einstein, Alexander Friedman and others discovered models of the universe
based on the new theory of gravity of General Relativity, and on the assumption of homogeneity and
isotropy of the universe. This assumption was then not suggested by any observation, but it was assumed
because of its simplicity and beauty. It is interesting that the universe actually turned out to be correctly
described on large scales by the most simple assumption, the cosmological principle!
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L: Hubble’s law showed that the universe is expanding, and it was the first indication of the validity of
the cosmological principle. Other evidence for the cosmological principle came only much later, because
initially observations showed only the distribution of galaxies in clusters and voids on scales that are
not very large. Radio sources discovered in the 1950’s were much more distant, and their distribution
in the sky was found to be isotropic. Quasars, also related to very luminous accreting black holes like
luminous radio sources, are also distributed isotropically because of the large distances at which they are
found. More recently, galaxy surveys going also out to large distances show them to be homogeneously
distributed. We’ll see later about the isotropy of the Cosmic Microwave Background, revealed when it
was discovered in 1964.
L: Homogeneity and isotropy start being good approximations on scales larger than ∼ 50 Mpc.
Q: Since the universe is expanding now, what does that say about its past?
Q: If there were no change in the velocity of a fixed galaxy, currently at distance r, how long has the universe
been expanding?
L: All galaxies were increasingly close as we go back to the past. If matter was conserved, the density had to
be a lot higher:
A: ρ = ρ0 (a/a0 )−3 .
L: This leads to the Big Bang idea. In the Big Bang, all matter was indeed created a finite time ago, even
though the age is not given exactly by 1/H0 because of the acceleration by gravity.
Q: In this Big Bang model, once the Hubble constant is measured, what prediction can we make that can test
the model?
A: Stars and any other objects in the universe should all be younger than the age of the universe, this is found
to be correct today.
L: Is the Big Bang the only possibility? Not if matter can be created continuously. The Steady State model
makes the hypothesis of the perfect cosmological principle: the properties of the universe do not change
with time. As the universe expands, more matter is created so that the density is constant. Since the
Hubble constant is then constant in time, the scale factor changes as a(t) ∝ eH0 t . There is no beginning
or end.
A: Look at the universe at great distances, where it is seen in the past. Is it exactly the same as the present
universe?
L: In the 1960s there was increasing evidence that the radio source population has evolved. Today we can see
this directly in the galaxies at high redshift. The discovery of the Cosmic Microwave Background discarded
the Steady State model, but it is still conceptionally useful to understand the alternative possibilities.
Summary: The observation of the expansion of the universe led to two models: the Big Bang and the Steady
State theory. The Steady State theory was eliminated observationally, both by noticing the evolution
of distant sources and the discovery of the CMB. The Big Bang predicts the age of the universe, and
the existence of a horizon or maximum distance at which we see the earliest sources of any light. The
expansion solves Olbers’ paradox.