Hubble Tension May Be Loosening

Hubble tension is the difference in results that scientists get when they try to measure the rate at which our Universe expands. Find out how a new study may have split the difference and loosened the tension between two camps of researchers.

The Hubble tension refers to the discrepancies scientists have found between two ways of measuring how fast our Universe is expanding. That rate of speed is called the Hubble Constant, and it has a long history of being tricky to pin down.

The discrepancy matters because cosmologists need an accurate expansion rate to estimate the age of the Universe. They know the approximate size of the Universe, and they know it’s expanding.

By reversing that expansion, they can work their way back to the origin of the Universe at the Big Bang event. Science has a rough idea of the velocity of the Universe’s expansion. Still, it hasn’t managed to determine its exact rate.

SCIENCE HASN’T PINNED DOWN PRECISE EXPANSION RATE

Part of the Hubble tension problem is that scientists approach the speed measurement in two ways. One way is to measure the distance to a particular class of stars called Cepheids. The other is to measure the fluctuations in the trace radiation left over from the Big Bang that astronomers call the Cosmic Microwave…