My thoughts on what the Hubble tension really is, based on George Efstathiou’s “To H0 or not to H0?“, arXiv:2103.08723.
This week is a bit special, and I have been debating with myself for some time whether I should have talked about the XENON electronic recoil excess we all have heard about, reported in 2006.09721 (this inner debate is one of the reasons behind my delay). Ordinarily I would have done so, but this time I opted for no, simply because there is much better coverage on the XENON result out there than anything I could possibly produce (needless to say many other popular science articles on the XENON results are instead pure junk). Natalie Wolchover is probably one of my favorite scientific journalists (by far the best among the ones I have interacted with), so for those interested in an excellent coverage of the XENON result, I recommend her piece on Quanta Magazine. Having said that, I’ve devoted this week’s entry to a new measurement of H0 from the Baryonic Tully-Fisher relation, a new neutrino mass forecast for cosmology taking into account a very subtle effect on the galaxy bias, and a study of the shadows of rotating regular black holes.
On the day the UK leaves the EU and I get to live in a non-EU country again after 5 years (yeah!), here comes the fifth installment of my “Top arXiv papers of the week“ column. From this week, I will be reviewing 3 papers instead of 5 (for more info, please see this post). You might also have noticed that my blog now has a name (again, see this post for more info). Enjoy!
