At National Geographic: A million to one odds that the universe’s expansion mystery is a statistical fluke

Hubble is still in business and provides a mystery that maybe James Webb can help with:

It’s one of the biggest puzzles in modern astronomy: Based on multiple observations of stars and galaxies, the universe seems to be flying apart faster than our best models of the cosmos predict it should. Evidence of this conundrum has been accumulating for years, causing some researchers to call it a looming crisis in cosmology.

Now a group of researchers using the Hubble Space Telescope has compiled a massive new dataset, and they’ve found a-million-to-one odds that the discrepancy is a statistical fluke. In other words, it’s looking even more likely that there’s some fundamental ingredient of the cosmos—or some unexpected effect of the known ingredients—that astronomers have yet to pin down.

Michael Greshko, “The universe is expanding faster than it should be” at National Geographic December 17, 2021

It’ll be no surprise if James Webb creates bigger mysteries than Hubble as well as solving some.

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