The Hubble Space Telescope has reportedly reached a new milestone in its quest to measure the speed at which the universe is expanding, and it strongly suggests that something strange is going on in our cosmos.
Astronomers have recently utilized telescopes like Hubble to measure how quickly the cosmos is expanding.
However, as the data were refined, a peculiar finding was made. There is a considerable gap between evidence from the immediate aftermath of the Big Bang and the universe's current rate of expansion.
The discrepancy has been left unsolved by scientists. However, it demonstrates that "something weird"—possibly the result of as-yet-unidentified new physics—is occurring in our universe.
For the past 30 years, Hubble has been gathering information on a series of "milepost markers" in space and time that can be used to determine how quickly the universe is expanding away from Earth.
More than 40 of the markers have reportedly been calibrated by NASA, enabling even greater precision than before.
The Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) and Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, along with Nobel Laureate Adam Riess said in a statement: "You are getting the most precise measure of the expansion rate for the universe from the gold standard of telescopes and cosmic mile markers."
He is the head of a team of researchers that recently published a new study paper outlining the greatest and probably final substantial upgrade from the Hubble Space Telescope, tripling the prior set of mile markers and reexamining the data already available.
When American astronomer Edwin Hubble noticed that galaxies beyond our own looked to be moving away from us - and moving faster the more away they are - he set out to find an exact estimate of how quickly space was expanding. Since that time, researchers have been trying to learn more about that expansion.
Both the rate of expansion and the space telescope that has been researching it bear the name Hubble in recognition of the astronomer's work.
The universe was found to be expanding faster than predicted when the space telescope started gathering data on it. While data indicate that it is closer to 73, astronomers predict that it should be around 67.5 km/s per megaparsec, plus or minus 0.5.
The likelihood of astronomers being off is one in a million. Instead, it suggests that there is still much to learn about how the cosmos is developing and that the universe's evolution and expansion are more complex than we previously imagined.
The newly launched James Webb Space Telescope, which will soon send back its first observations, will be used by scientists to delve deeper into this difficulty. They should be able to see more recent, far-off, and detailed mileposts as a result.
Reference(s): NASA
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