this post was submitted on 08 Apr 2025
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...there are two different ways to measure this cosmic expansion rate, and they don’t agree. One method looks deep into the past by analyzing cosmic microwave background radiation, the faint afterglow of the Big Bang. The other studies Cepheid variable stars in nearby galaxies, whose brightness allows astronomers to map more recent expansion.

You’d expect both methods to give the same answer. Instead, they disagree—by a lot. And this mismatch is what scientists call the Hubble tension...Webb’s data agrees with Hubble’s and completely rules out measurement error as the cause of the discrepancy. It’s now harder than ever to explain away the tension as a statistical fluke. This inconsistency suggests something big might be missing from our understanding of the universe - something beyond current theories involving dark matter, dark energy, or even gravity itself. When the same universe appears to expand at different rates depending on how and where you look, it raises the possibility that our entire cosmological model may need rethinking.

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[–] [email protected] 18 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago) (1 children)

We don't even understand what caused the incomprehensibly fast rate of expansion after the Big Bang known as "cosmic inflation", but basically JWST has confirmed that the rate of acceleration of the universe is, itself, accelerating beyond our models. Everything, everywhere since 0.01 quectoseconds^1^ after the Big Bang has always moved faster than we could predict, and we don't why!

“What the results still do not explain is why the universe appears to be expanding so fast! We can predict the expansion rate of the universe by observing its baby picture, the cosmic microwave background, and then employing our best model of how it grows up over time to tell us how fast the universe should be expanding today. The fact that the present measure of the expansion rate significantly exceeds the prediction is a now decade-long problem called “The Hubble Tension.”

  1. Quecto, the smallest metric SI prefix, 1*10^-30^, is still 100x too large to measure the time between the Big Bang and Cosmic Inflation.