Will Universe double in size in 10 years? Here’s what Hubble says

Ongoing scientific discoveries have increased our hunger to know more about the universe. While researchers are exploring life on Mars, the question about the size of the universe continues to remain unknown. In 1920s, Edwin Hubble had shown that the universe’ size wasn’t fixed and is expanding.

Almost a century later, Edwin’s namesake, the Hubble Space Telescope has made another prediction about the size of the Universe.

According to the latest prediction, the universe will double in size in 10 billion years. Experts claim that the latest prediction is the most accurate as yet. Astronomers have narrowed down the expansion rate to a precision of just over one per cent.

The latest prediction has been made following three decades of meticulous observations and data gathering by many expert astronomers. According to experts, this measurement is nearly eight times more accurate than Hubble’s expected capability.

Former discoveries made by Edwin Hubble revealed that many galaxies outside the Milky Way galaxy weren’t standing still. Hubble discovered that the farther a galaxy is, the faster it appears to be moving away from us.

This was further studied as the expansion rate of space that is called as the Hubble constant (a unit of measurement that shows that the universe is expanding since the discovery of the Big Bang).

When the Hubble Space Telescope was introduced in 1990, the expansion rate of universe may be close to 8 billion years or about 20 billion years.

Post observing the recent studies, NASA says that given the large Humble sample size, there is just a one-in-a-million chance that astronomers’ predictions are wrong.

The recent findings about expansion rate will be published in the Special Focus issue of The Astrophysical Journal. The journal will unveil details about the last major update on the Hubble constant.