A team of astrophysicists has harnessed the power of artificial intelligence (AI) to unlock secrets about the universe’s fundamental properties. They’ve achieved unprecedented precision in estimating five of the six key parameters that describe the universe’s large-scale structure and evolution. This groundbreaking research could lead to a solution for the perplexing ‘Hubble tension’, a long-standing discrepancy in how fast the universe is expanding.
Scientists rely on six cosmological parameters to paint a picture of our universe. These parameters define the density of ordinary matter (baryons), dark matter, and dark energy, and also describe conditions in the immediate aftermath of the Big Bang, including the universe’s opacity and clumpiness. Precisely determining these parameters is crucial for comprehending the universe’s origins and its future trajectory.
Traditional methods for estimating these parameters often rely on analyzing the distribution of galaxies across vast cosmic scales. However, the AI approach employed by the researchers has allowed them to extract these parameters from smaller-scale data, yielding a result for the universe’s matter clumping with significantly lower uncertainty than previous methods. This innovative method has the potential to revolutionize our understanding of the universe.
The researchers trained their AI system on 2,000 simulated universes, each with unique cosmological settings and artificial data imperfections to mimic real-world observational limitations. This allowed their model to identify patterns in galaxy distributions based on variations in the universes’ parameters. Then, they presented the AI with data from 109,636 real galaxies observed by the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey. The AI system delivered parameter estimates as precise as those obtained from traditional surveys using four times as many galaxies.
One of the most exciting applications of this breakthrough is its potential to shed light on the ‘Hubble tension’. This long-standing debate stems from conflicting estimates of the universe’s expansion rate, depending on the region of space studied. The researchers hope that by feeding data from upcoming cosmic surveys into their model, they can finally resolve this tension and determine whether it reflects a deeper misunderstanding of the universe or points towards the existence of unknown physics.
‘If we measure these quantities very precisely and can firmly say that there is a tension, that could reveal new physics about dark energy and the expansion of the universe,’ said study lead author ChangHoon Hahn. This research represents a significant leap forward in our understanding of the universe, offering a powerful new tool for unraveling its mysteries and potentially resolving the puzzling Hubble tension. The findings were published in the journal Nature Astronomy.
