Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by astro123 2310 days ago
Famously, Hubble's 1931 paper that detected the expansion of the universe found H0 ~ 500 km/s/Mpc (fig 5 in [1]). The distances that he was using were way off...

Through most of the late 1900s the uncertainty was between 50 and 100 km/s/Mpc.

Now we know it at least as well as most other things, but this history of uncertainty means it is treated differently. Most annoyingly, simulations often work in units of Distance/h (where h = H0/100). This causes anyone who uses them incredible annoyance as you need to get your factors of little h right. Someone even wrote a paper called "Damn you little h" [2]. It's a total pain...

[1] http://articles.adsabs.harvard.edu/pdf/1931ApJ....74...43H

[2] https://arxiv.org/abs/1308.4150