Using information gathered from 140 thousand different quasars and intergalactic hydrogen, scientists claim to have made the most precise measurements of how fast the early Universe was expanding over long stretches of time. According to data from the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey, which is part of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, the Universe started expanding rapidly after the Big Bang happened an estimated 13 point 8 billion years ago.
Using information gathered from 140 thousand different galaxies known as quasars, as well as clouds of intergalactic hydrogen gas, scientists claim to have made the most precise measurements of how fast the Universe has been expanding, both when young and in more recent times.
According to data from the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey, which is part of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, the Universe started expanding rapidly after the Big Bang happened an estimated 13 point 8 billion years ago.
Then the expansion started to slow down due to the effects of gravity, before speeding up again around six billion years ago.
Researchers working on the study say that three billion years after the Big Bang, the known Universe was growing by one percent every 44 million years.
Doctor Matthew Pieri, from the University of Portsmouth in the United Kingdom who worked on the survey, is quoted as saying: "We expected to see the Universe expanding faster than what we found. The disagreement could still be a statistical fluke, or it could be that the Universe was different to how we thought it was, but we'll have to explore this further to find out."
Experts hope that this study will lead to a deeper understanding of dark energy, which they think is responsible for the increased speed of the Universe expansion over the past 6 billion years.