(Photo: Wikimedia Commons/NASA/MSFC/David Higginbotham/Emmett Given)
Astronomers know that the universe is expanding but cannot determine the rate. They are confident that they will soon find it out with the help of the James Webb Space Telescope.
James Webb Space Telescope To Help Solve "Hubble Tension" Puzzle
Astronomers are having difficulty figuring out the rate of the universe's expansion because the data that the Hubble telescope has gathered does not match up. Thus, the problem is dubbed the "Hubble Tension" mystery.
For 30 years, the Hubble telescope has been tracking the universe's expansion. However, the Hubble Space Telescope and other instruments always discover new data that deviates from earlier estimates.
The Planck mission of the European Space Agency yielded the first predictions. The mission, which ran from 2009 to 2013, was Europe's first attempt to learn more about the origins of our universe by studying the relic radiation from the Big Bang.
The approximations differ by roughly 10 percent. Should the higher ratio be accurate, the cosmos would be approximately 10% younger than previously believed. So, the expert combined the data from James Webb Space and Hubble to solve the problem.
New research from a partnership between the Hubble and the James Webb Space Telescope has produced definitive measurements that prove measurement errors are not at play here. The differing estimates are due to something else entirely, which remains a mystery.
Webb and Hubble began making paired observations in 2023. They immediately showed that the Hubble telescope had been accurate in its measurements.
A team led by Adam Riess, a physicist at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore and Nobel prize winner for the co-discovery of the universe's increased expansion, used methods to measure the distances of Cepheid variable stars in the universe. The measurement techniques are known as "the cosmic distance ladder" in astronomy.
With the latest data from the Hubble and Webb spacecraft, scientists are getting closer to unraveling the riddle of the Hubble Tension.
"Combining Webb and Hubble gives us the best of both worlds. We find that the Hubble measurements remain reliable as we climb farther along the cosmic distance ladder," Riess stated.
He added that negating measurement mistakes leaves them with the intriguing and plausible prospect that their understanding of the universe is incorrect. They have now covered the whole spectrum of observations made by Hubble and have a high degree of confidence in ruling out a measurement error as the source of the Hubble Tension.
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What Is the Hubble Tension?
The Hubble-Lemaitre constant describes how quickly the cosmos is expanding. However, the true value of this constant is controversial because various measurement methods yield inconsistent results. They coined the problem the "Hubble tension," which has remained a mystery among astronomers for decades.
In a new study, researchers from the Universities of Bonn and St. Andrews propose a new theory of gravity that suggests the gap in the measured values may be readily explained by eliminating the Hubble tension.
According to Milgrom's theory, the Hubble tension would vanish if gravity truly behaved. There would be just one constant for the universe's expansion, and anomalies in the distribution of matter would cause the observed deviations.
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