The universe is expanding faster than previously thought. A team of astronomers from the Space Telescope Institute and John Hopkins University led by Nobel laureate Adam Reiss detail their findings in a new paper for The Astrophysical Journal. They used four years’ worth of data from the Hubble Space Telescope to determine that the universe is actually expanding about nine percent faster than other leading measurements predicted, which is a huge mismatch in a field that is usually so precise. According to Motherboard, the data used to reach this conclusion is the most accurate measurement of the expansion since the Edwin Hubble discovered the universe was expanding nearly a century ago.
“The community is really grappling with understanding the meaning of this discrepancy,” Reiss, who shared a Nobel Prize for discovering that the universe expands at an accelerating rate in 1998, said in a statement, according to Motherboard.
We know the universe is expanding because Edwin Hubble, using insight from Harvard astronomer Henrietta Leavitt, proved the existence of a galaxy outside our own for the first time. He went on to discover many more galaxies and discovered that as the distance between two galaxies increases, so does the relative speech at which they are moving away from one another. Reiss thinks that dark energy or dark radiation contributes to the accelerating expansion of the universe, and also might contribute to the discrepancies in data thus far. He and his team hope to continue to gather data from the Hubble telescope for years to come.
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