© AlamyAn artist's illustration of the James Webb Space Telescope.
For decades, measurements of the universe's expansion have suggested
a disparity known as the Hubble tension, which threatens to break cosmology as we know it. Now, on the eve of its second anniversary, a new finding by the James Webb Space Telescope has only entrenched the mystery.
Something is awry in our expanding cosmos.Nearly a century ago, the astronomer Edwin Hubble discovered the balloon-like inflation of the universe and the accelerating rush of all galaxies away from each other. Following that expansion backward in time led to our current best understanding of how everything began —
the Big Bang.But over the past decade, an alarming hole has been growing in this picture: Depending on where astronomers look,
the rate of the universe's expansion (a value called the
Hubble constant)
varies significantly.Now, on the second anniversary of its launch, the
James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has cemented the discrepancy with stunningly precise new observations that threaten to upend the standard model of cosmology.The new physics needed to modify or even replace the 40-year-old theory is now a topic of fierce debate.
Comment: It's perhaps no coincidence that China is releasing this information so publicly, and putting it up for scrutiny, at this rather turbulent time on our planet; and this is just the technology that they're choosing to make public: