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New papers published by two of the central players are raising hopes that additional observations from the James Webb Space Telescope, or JWST, of certain types of stars and supernovas could solve the question of whether the discord is real, once and for all.
The two teams disagree about whether that tension exists at all. One team says there’s no strong evidence for the Hubble tension from the JWST data. But the other group says the JWST data strengthen the case that the two types of measurements are in conflict. “I’m even more intrigued by the Hubble tension,” says cosmologist Adam Riess of Johns Hopkins University, leader of one of the teams.
The different camps are finally seeing eye to eye on one piece of their measurements: distances to nearby galaxies, which are necessary to deduce the expansion rate of the universe from supernovas. “This is really new — we’re agreeing on distances, and that’s real progress,” says cosmologist Wendy Freedman of the University of Chicago, who leads the other team.
“If you told me 10 years ago that all this would be agreeing at this level, I would just be jumping up and down,” says cosmologist Daniel Scolnic of Duke University, a member of Riess’s team.
That agreement gives scientists newfound confidence that the longstanding dispute is close to resolution. “I’m pretty optimistic that in the next couple of years, the questions that we’re talking about now, we will have resolved those,” Freedman says.
Coming to consensus on distances
Scientists’ theory of the universe, called the standard cosmological model, is based largely on unknowns. Dark matter, a substance that adds unseen mass to galaxies, has never been directly detected. And dark energy,…
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