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The cosmic distance scale and H0: Past, present, and future

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 February 2013

Wendy L. Freedman
Wendy L. Freedman*
Affiliation:
The Observatories, Carnegie Institution for Science, 813 Santa Barbara Street, Pasadena, CA 91101, USA email: wendy@obs.carnegiescience.edu
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Abstract

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Twenty years ago, there was disagreement at a level of a factor of two as regards the value of the expansion rate of the Universe. Ten years ago, a value that was good to 10% was established using the Hubble Space Telescope (HST), completing one of the primary missions that NASA designed and built the HST to undertake. Today, after confronting most of the systematic uncertainties listed at the end of the Key Project, we are looking at a value of the Hubble constant that is plausibly known to within 3%. In the near future, an independently determined value of H0 good to 1% is desirable to constrain the extraction of other cosmological parameters from the power spectrum of the cosmic microwave background in defining a concordance model of cosmology. We review recent progress and assess the future prospects for those tighter constraints on the Hubble constant, which were unimaginable just a decade ago.

Keywords

cosmological parametersdistance scalegalaxies: distances and redshiftsinfrared: starsCepheids
Type
Contributed Papers
Information
Proceedings of the International Astronomical Union , Volume 8 , Symposium S289: Advancing the Physics of Cosmic Distances , August 2012 , pp. 3 - 9
Copyright
Copyright © International Astronomical Union 2013

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