Since scholarly articles are often very research heavy with lots of scientific jargon you may not be familiar with, reading the popular source discussing the study first can help you understand it better. Popular sources are written with a general audience in mind, and are intended to be understood by someone who has little or no scientific background. Some popular sources can help immensely with understanding scientific literature. In addition to Kelly, the team included researchers from the University of Minnesota's Minnesota Institute for Astrophysics the University of South Carolina the University of California, Los Angeles Stanford University the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne Sorbonne University the University of California, Berkeley the University of Toronto Rutgers University the University of Copenhagen the University of Cambridge the Kavli Institute for Cosmology Ben-Gurion University of the Negev University of the Basque Country the University of Cantabria Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Cientificas (the Spanish National Research Council) the Observatories of the Carnegie Institution for Science the University of Portsmouth Durham University the University of California, Santa Barbara the University of Tokyo the Space Telescope Science Institute the Leibniz Institute for Astrophysics Potsdam the University of Michigan Australian National University Stony Brook University Heidelberg University and Chiba University.Why start with a secondary (or popular) source? This research was funded primarily by NASA through the Space Telescope Science Institute and the National Science Foundation. This allowed them to determine the most accurate models for the locations of dark matter in the galaxy cluster, a question that has long plagued astronomers. Using the same data, the researchers found that some current models of galaxy-cluster dark matter were able to explain their observations of the supernovae. "If observations of future supernovae that are also gravitationally lensed by clusters yield a similar result, then it would identify an issue with the current supernova value, or with our understanding of galaxy-cluster dark matter." "Our measurement favors the value from the cosmic microwave background, although it is not in strong disagreement with the supernova value," Kelly said. The researchers' findings don't absolutely settle the debate, Kelly said, but they do provide more insight into the problem and bring physicists closer to obtaining the most accurate measurement of the Universe's age. By using the time delays between the appearances of the 20 images, the researchers were able to measure the Hubble Constant using a theory developed in 1964 by Norwegian astronomer Sjur Refsdal that had previously been impossible to put into practice. These multiple images appeared because the supernova was gravitationally lensed by a galaxy cluster, a phenomenon in which mass from the cluster bends and magnifies light. After the discovery, teams around the world predicted that the supernova would reappear at a new position in 2015, and the University of Minnesota team detected this additional image. The University of Minnesota-led team was able to calculate this value using data from a supernova discovered by Kelly in 2014 - the first ever example of a multiply imaged supernova, meaning that the telescope captured four different images of the same cosmic event. Our research addresses that by using an independent, completely different way to measure the expansion rate of the Universe." "The big question is if there is a possible issue with one or both of the measurements. "If new, independent measurements confirm this disagreement between the two measurements of the Hubble constant, it would become a chink in the armor of our understanding of the cosmos," said Patrick Kelly, lead author of both papers and an assistant professor in the University of Minnesota School of Physics and Astronomy. If both measurements are accurate, that means scientists' current theory about the make-up of the universe is incomplete. However, these two measurements differ by about 10 percent, which has caused widespread debate among physicists and astronomers. In astronomy, there are two precise measurements of the expansion of the Universe, also called the "Hubble constant." One is calculated from nearby observations of supernovae, and the second uses the "cosmic microwave background," or radiation that began to stream freely through the Universe shortly after the Big Bang. The work is divided into two papers, respectively published in Science, one of the world's top peer-reviewed academic journals, and The Astrophysical Journal, a peer-reviewed scientific journal of astrophysics and astronomy.
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