4. New Measurements of the Cosmological Distance Ladder
- Title: The clustering of galaxies in the SDSS-III Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey: baryon acoustic oscillations in the Data Release 9 spectroscopic galaxy sample
- Authors: L. Anderson, E. Aubourg, S. Bailey, et al.
- First Author’s Institution: Department of Astronomy, University of Washington
Why it is important: If you want to know what is making our universe accelerate, you need excellent measurements of how it is accelerating. Specifically, you want to know the total amount the universe has expanded during the time photons traveled from distant sources (redshift) as a function of the current distances to these sources, and this requires either a standard candle or a standard ruler.