New measurements taken with the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) have deepened the scientific controversy of the Hubble tension — suggesting it may not exist at all.
For years, astronomers have found that the universe appears to be expanding at different speeds depending on where they look — a conundrum they call the Hubble tension.
Some of the measurements confirm our best current understanding of the universe, while others threaten to break it.
When JWST came online in 2022, one team of researchers used the space telescope's unprecedented accuracy to confirm the Hubble tension.
But according to the new results from a different team of scientists, the Hubble tension may arise from measurement error and not exist after all. Yet even these results are not definitive.
Currently, there are two gold-standard methods for figuring out the Hubble constant, a value that describes the expansion rate of the universe.
The first involves poring over tiny fluctuations in the cosmic microwave background — an ancient relic of the universe's first light produced just 380,000 years after the Big Bang.
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