With new evidence supporting the puzzling finding that the universe is expanding faster than anticipated, scientists are wondering what could be causing this, possibly some unidentified element involving the enigmatic cosmic elements dark energy and dark matter.
The Hubble Space Telescope’s earlier conclusion that the universe is expanding at a faster rate—by roughly 8%—than would be predicted given what astrophysicists know about the early conditions in the cosmos and its evolution over billions of years has now been confirmed by two years of data from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope. The Hubble Tension is the name given to the disparity.
The observations made by Webb, the most powerful space observatory ever put into operation, seem to disprove the idea that the data from its predecessor, Hubble, was faulty in some way because of the instruments.
