Developments and trends of the 20th and 21st centuries

Astronomy

Some of the most spectacular advances in modern astronomy have come from research on the large-scale structure and development of the universe. This research goes back to William Herschel’s observations of nebulas at the end of the 18th century. Some astronomers considered them to be “island universes”—huge stellar systems outside of and comparable to the Milky Way Galaxy, to which the solar system belongs. Others, following Herschel’s own speculations, thought of them simply as gaseous clouds—relatively small patches of diffuse matter within the Milky Way Galaxy, which might be in the process of developing into stars and planetary systems, as described in Laplace’s nebular hypothesis.

In 1912 Vesto Slipher began at the Lowell Observatory in Arizona an extensive program to measure the velocities of nebulas, using the Doppler shift of their spectral lines. (Doppler shift is the observed change in wavelength of the radiation from a source that results from the relative motion of the latter along the line of sight.) By 1925 he had studied about 40 nebulas, most of which were found to be moving away from Earth according to the redshift (displacement toward longer wavelengths) of their spectra.

Although the nebulas were apparently so far away that their distances could not be measured directly by the stellar parallax method, an indirect approach was developed on the basis of a discovery made in 1908 by Henrietta Swan Leavitt at the Harvard College Observatory. Leavitt studied the magnitudes (apparent brightnesses) of a large number of variable stars, including the type known as Cepheid variables. Some of them were close enough to have measurable parallaxes so that their distances and thus their intrinsic brightnesses could be determined. She found a correlation between brightness and period of variation. Assuming that the same correlation holds for all stars of this kind, their observed magnitudes and periods could be used to estimate their distances.

In 1923 American astronomer Edwin Hubble identified a Cepheid variable in the so-called Andromeda Nebula. Using Leavitt’s period–brightness correlation, Hubble estimated its distance to be approximately 900,000 light-years. Since this was much greater than the size of the Milky Way system, it appeared that the Andromeda Nebula must be another galaxy (island universe) outside of our own.

In 1929 Hubble combined Slipher’s measurements of the velocities of nebulas with further estimates of their distances and found that on the average such objects are moving away from Earth with a velocity proportional to their distance. Hubble’s velocity–distance relation suggested that the universe of galactic nebulas is expanding, starting from an initial state about two billion years ago in which all matter was contained in a fairly small volume. Revisions of the distance scale in the 1950s and later increased the “Hubble age” of the universe to more than 10 billion years.

Calculations by Aleksandr A. Friedmann in the Soviet Union, Willem de Sitter in the Netherlands, and Georges Lemaître in Belgium, based on Einstein’s general theory of relativity, showed that the expanding universe could be explained in terms of the evolution of space itself. According to Einstein’s theory, space is described by the non-Euclidean geometry proposed in 1854 by the German mathematician G.F. Bernhard Riemann. Its departure from Euclidean space is measured by a “curvature” that depends on the density of matter. The universe may be finite, though unbounded, like the surface of a sphere. Thus, the expansion of the universe refers not merely to the motion of extragalactic stellar systems within space but also to the expansion of the space itself.

The beginning of the expanding universe was linked to the formation of the chemical elements in a theory developed in the 1940s by the physicist George Gamow, a former student of Friedmann who had emigrated to the United States. Gamow proposed that the universe began in a state of extremely high temperature and density and exploded outward—the so-called big bang. Matter was originally in the form of neutrons, which quickly decayed into protons and electrons; these then combined to form hydrogen and heavier elements.

Gamow’s students Ralph Alpher and Robert Herman estimated in 1948 that the radiation left over from the big bang should by now have cooled down to a temperature just a few degrees above absolute zero (0 K, or −459 °F). In 1965 the predicted cosmic background radiation was discovered by Arno Penzias and Robert Woodrow Wilson of the Bell Telephone Laboratories as part of an effort to build sensitive microwave-receiving stations for satellite communication. Their finding provided unexpected evidence for the idea that the universe was in a state of very high temperature and density 13.8 billion years ago.

The study of distant galaxies also revealed that ordinary visible matter is a tiny fraction of the matter-energy of the universe. In 1933 Fritz Zwicky found that the Coma cluster of galaxies did not contain enough mass in its stars to keep the cluster together. American astronomers Vera Rubin and W. Kent Ford confirmed this finding in the 1970s when they discovered that the stellar mass of a galaxy is only about 10 percent of that needed to keep the stars bound to the galaxy. This “missing mass” came to be called dark matter and makes up 26.5 percent of the matter-energy of the universe.

The dominant component of the universe is dark energy, a repulsive force that accelerates the universe’s expansion. Despite being 73 percent of the universe’s matter-energy, its nature is not well understood. Dark energy was discovered only by observations of distant supernovas in the 1990s made by two international teams of astronomers that included American astronomers Adam Riess and Saul Perlmutter and Australian astronomer Brian Schmidt.