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Where is the cosmos going?
Although we do not know this, we can already determine with a high degree of accuracy how fast it is speeding up. That is, at what speed the galaxies, the basic material structures of the Universe, are moving away from each other.
The sequence of events is as follows: when, in 1929, Edwin Hubble found that galaxies — whose existence he himself had discovered five years earlier — were moving away from each other faster and faster as their distance increased, the modern science of the Universe was born. Its starting point and foundation was the concept of the Big Bang, which gave the Universe the dynamics that allowed it to expand.
A derivative of this discovery was the establishment of the so-called Hubble constant. It says that the Universe is expanding, and therefore every megaparsec (Mpc) of space grows by a certain value every second (a megaparsec is one million parsecs, and a parsec — pc — is 3.26 light years). In other words — the Hubble constant describes the rate of expansion of the Universe as a function of time, and allows us to calculate how much a galaxy that is a megaparsec (3.3 million light years) away from us moves away every second. However, the exact calculation of this “how much” is not at all an easy task.
Initially, this constant was set very high, at a few hundred kilometers per second in a megaparsec — this result was…
