The Hubble Space Telescope has reached a new stage in its work to see how fast the universe is expanding – and it supports the idea that something strange is happening in our universe, says NASA.
In recent years, astronomers have used telescopes like Hubble to see how fast our universe is expanding.
But as these measures became more accurate, they also showed something strange. There is a key difference between the rate of expansion of the universe as it is around us compared to observations immediately after the Big Bang.
Scientists cannot explain this discrepancy. But this suggests that “something strange” is happening in our universe, which may be the result of unknown, new physics, says NASA.
For the past 30 years, Hubble has been collecting information on a set of “mercy markets” in space and time that can be used to track the rate at which the universe is expanding as it moves away from us.
It has now calibrated more than 40 of the markers, NASA said, allowing for even greater accuracy than before.
“You get the most accurate measure of the rate of expansion of the universe from the gold standard of telescopes and space mile markers,” said Nobel laureate Adam Rees of the Space Telescope Research Institute (STScI) and Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland. , in a statement.
He is the leader of a team of scientists who have published a new article describing the largest and probably latest major update from the Hubble Space Telescope, doubling the previous set of mile markers, and re-analyzing existing data.
The search for an accurate measure of how fast space is expanding came when American astronomer Edwin Hubble thought that galaxies outside ours seemed to be moving away from us – and doing so faster the farther away from us. Since then, scientists have sought a better understanding of this extension.
(Both the speed of expansion and the space telescope that studied it are called Hubble, in honor of the astronomer’s work.)
However, when the space telescope began gathering information about the expansion of the universe, it turned out to be faster than the models predicted. Astronomers predict that it should be about 67.5 kilometers per second per megaparsec, give or take 0.5 – but observations show that it is about 73.
There is only one in a million chance that astronomers were wrong. Instead, it suggests that the evolution and expansion of the universe is more complex than we realize, and that there is more to learn about how the universe is changing.
Scientists hope to delve into this difficulty with the new James Webb Space Telescope, which was recently launched into space and will soon send its first observations. This should allow them to see new points that are even further away and with better resolution.
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