NASA Says ‘Something Strange Is Happening’ With The Universe

at recent days press release The National Aeronautics and Space Administration has new images taken by the Hubble Space Telescope, and said that something strange was going on in outer space. No, that’s what they really said:

In recent years, thanks to data from Hubble and other telescopes, astronomers have found another development: a discrepancy between the rate of expansion as measured in the local universe compared to independent observations just after the Big Bang, which predicted a different expansion value.

The reason for this discrepancy remains a mystery. But the Hubble data, which includes a variety of cosmic objects that act as distance markers, supports the idea that something strange is happening, possibly involving entirely new physics.

Since the discovery of dark energy In the 1990s, researchers were able to calculate The grand total of the article in the universe. This data, with help from the powerful Hubble Space Telescope, has helped scientists track the rate of expansion of the universe. Which is so cool! Except for now – as this press release makes clear – there is something turning off. Because their calculations were correct until they weren’t.

The expansion rate of the universe was expected to be slower than what Hubble actually sees. By combining Standard cosmological model of the universe and measurements by The European Space Agency’s Planck mission (who observed the cosmic microwave background remaining 13.8 billion years ago), astronomers expected a lower value for the Hubble constant: 67.5 plus or minus 0.5 kilometers per second per megaparsec, compared to SH0ES [Supernova, H0] Team Rating 73.

Given Hubble’s large sample size, Reese said, there’s only a one in a million chance astronomers are wrong due to unlucky clouds, a common threshold for taking a problem seriously in physics.

So it’s not entirely Cosmic as Lovecraftian, but it’s still pretty weird.

Hubble reaches a new milestone in the mystery of the expansion rate of the universe [NASA]