Physicist duo Professor Thanu Padmanabhan and his daughter Dr Hamsa Padmanabhan has found the values of two of the most mysterious numbers in the universe

Hamsa and Thanu Padmanabhan have been working on this for three years

Two of the most mysterious numbers in the universe have now been explained by a Pune-based father-daughter physicist duo. These numbers relate to the two mysteries that have intrigued cosmologists for decades - the first is connected to the small fluctuations at the genesis of the universe, while the other is about the future of the cosmos, which continues to expand as it is stretched by 'dark energy' (force that is thought to be pulling galaxies apart).



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Billions of years apart

In standard cosmology, these two mysteries are considered unrelated, separated in cosmic time by about 14 billion years. But, Professor Thanu Padmanabhan and his daughter Dr Hamsa Padmanabhan, have connected and answered these fundamental questions about the cosmos.

"Small fluctuations in density existed in the universe very early – this is something we knew about, but what we didn't know was how to calculate its value," said Professor Thanu, a professor at the Inter University Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics, (IUCAA), Pune. His daughter is a researcher at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich (also known as Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule).

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Pointing out that this fluctuation in density was one part in 100,000, he added, "This one part is the small fluctuation that we are talking about, and it was shrouded in mystery. We wanted to discover a theoretical formula to determine its exact value."

Touching upon the second mystery, he said, "For a long time, we believed that the universe's expansion was slowing down after the big bang and, yes, it was for a long time. But when the universe got to a third of its size, the expansion started speeding up again. No one knows why this accelerated expansion of the universe happened. We wanted to understand it theoretically."

'Breakthrough'

"Our calculations tell us that these two things are related and we can write a mathematical formula that relates these two numbers in terms of other constants that are known to us; this is why we consider it a major breakthrough," said Thanu.

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According to him, Einstein's equation already tells us how to calculate things like at what speed will the universe expand, and whether the expansion is speeding up or slowing down. "In that equation, you have a cosmological constant, but you have to choose a very specific value for this constant in order to explain the speeding of the universe. The value you have to choose is very special and numerically, very tiny, and can also be called one of the tiniest numbers in physics," said Thanu (see box).

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