In the last few decades, one big question has created a crisis in the field of cosmology: How fast is the universe expanding?
Something very strange is up with cosmology. In the last few decades, one big question has created a crisis in the field: How fast is the universe expanding? We know that the universe has been expanding since the Big Bang, but the exact rate of this expansion is still not known for certain. The problem is that the rate of expansion seems to be different depending on what factors are used to measure it, and no one is sure why.
Recommended Videos The rate of the expansion of the universe is known as the Hubble constant, and there are two main ways in which it is measured. The first way is by looking at distant galaxies, and working out how far away they are by looking at particular types of stars that have predictable levels of brightness. This tells you how long the light has been traveling from that galaxy.
The problem is, these two methods disagree on the final figure for the Hubble constant. And as measurement techniques get more and more accurate, the difference isn’t going away. The researchers took previous Hubble measurements of the stars and pointed Webb at the same stars, to see if there were important differences in the data. Hubble was designed to look primarily in the visible light wavelength, but the stars had to be observed in the near-infrared because of the dust in the way, so the thought was that perhaps Hubble’s infrared vision was just not crisp enough to see the stars accurately.
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