New information from the James Webb Space Telescope has verified what scientists have always suspected – our current understanding of the way the universe is expanding may be irreparably flawed. What scientists initially accounted for as a negligible measurement artifact is now a full-blown cosmology crisis.
The contentious find is the Hubble constant, or how fast our universe is growing. Scientists have attempted to estimate this number for decades using two distinct methods in hopes of getting the same answer. Instead, they’ve found a huge disparity that the James Webb telescope has now confirmed.
“If there are no measurement errors, what remains is the exciting possibility that we have misinterpreted the universe” responds Adam Riess, Nobel Prize in Physics and project leader for the study probing this cosmological mystery.
James Webb and the Quest to Resolve the Hubble Tension
The first technique of measurement takes into account cosmic microwave background radiation, effectively the Big Bang afterglow, and measures that the universe is expanding at a rate of around 67 kilometers per second per megaparsec.Â
The second technique, the measurement of the distance of certain stars called Cepheids and supernovae, measures a higher rate of expansion of around 74 kilometers per second per megaparsec.
This 10% difference seems innocuous, but on the scale of the universe, it’s a mind-boggling difference that defies our fundamental knowledge of physics. The researchers have referred to the discrepancy as the “Hubble tension,” and astronomers have been perplexed by it for decades.
The James Webb Space Telescope, operational since 2021, brings unprecedented precision to such measurements. It is 1.5 million kilometers distant from the Earth, employing advanced infrared technology that allows it to see deeper into space and time than its ancestor Hubble Space Telescope, resident in low Earth orbit since 1990.
The James Webb verification is important exactly because its state-of-the-art technology eliminates the potential for the discrepancy to have resulted from fundamental measurement flaws. This leaves scientists with more radical explanations.
Others speculate that there has to be hidden physics – maybe a hidden particle or force making the universe expand at varying rates depending on when and where you make your measurement. Others propose that our current understanding of the cosmic background radiation can be questioned.
This discovery has profound implications for the Big Bang theory, our current theory of the origin of the universe. If our measurements and calculations are accurate, then the universe is possibly more complex than our current theories suggest.
Challenging Established Theories
The tension is used to highlight the humbling reality that despite centuries of scientific progress, our understanding of the universe remains incomplete. The universe still has some surprises in store for us, challenging our most deeply rooted theories and pushing the boundaries of human knowledge.
“We have to accept that we don’t yet know all the secrets of the universe,” says one of the astronomers involved in the research. “This inconsistency may be pushing us toward a totally new idea of cosmology.”
The James Webb telescope will continue to gather information from distant galaxies to help unravel this cosmic enigma. Scientists hope future measurements can provide patterns that can help account for the discrepancy or be a signature of new physical laws. This finding reminds us that science is not a fixed set of knowledge but a dynamic process.
As our instruments get better and our measurements more accurate, we occasionally discover that the universe is stranger and more mysterious than we had previously thought.
Whatever the outcome of the Hubble tension, we do know this: the road to the solution of the universe is far from finished, and the most remarkable breakthroughs are perhaps yet to come.
