...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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[–] jam12705@lemmy.world 1 points 3 days ago

Maybe its a fingerprint on the glass

[–] vane@lemmy.world 8 points 6 days ago (1 children)

Maybe universe is not expanding after all.

https://www.sci.news/astronomy/science-universe-not-expanding-01940.html

[–] Krudler@lemmy.world 2 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago) (1 children)

Lerner is a massive kook and scam artist

[–] vane@lemmy.world 0 points 5 days ago (1 children)

Who isn't if it comes to a constant that changes after every measurement ?

[–] Krudler@lemmy.world 1 points 5 days ago

Irrelevant. The man is a scammer and a nut.

[–] Bob71@lemmynsfw.com 6 points 6 days ago (1 children)

Most rational people will completely ignore this theory, but what if it's just God fucking with us?

[–] JackbyDev@programming.dev 7 points 6 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago)

I could've sworn there was a thought experiment for an omnipotent being modifying the universe but only when we are intentionally trying to study it, but this is all I could find. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evil_demon

This concept is stuck in my mind as "Cartesian demon" but that only leads to the above which is more about the idea that we could be in a simulated reality. It's possible I'm getting an xkcd comic mixed in but I couldn't find it either based on a quick search.

Edit: The comic was something like a sliding scale (or maybe a flow chart) of different views of reality. On one end was everything is fake, even self, and the other end was that everything is real and measureable. Somewhere in the middle was the idea that reality exists but we can't measure it properly or objectively. Something like that. But it's also possible this comic was unrelated to whatever I'm remembering as "Cartesian demon" and I'm getting mixed up.

[–] x00z@lemmy.world 7 points 6 days ago (1 children)

Maybe it's the observer and the universe is in superposition, unfolding in every moment. Playing a little game with us as we try to win by understanding it.

[–] itsjess@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 points 6 days ago

I was just thinking this. All one big illusion that we can't understand because the universe evolves across billions of years; and we as humans haven't even been here for a million

[–] voodooattack@lemmy.world 4 points 6 days ago

Off topic: no full screen popover showing up to ask me to subscribe/disable adblocker/accept cookies? What is this site and how do I give them money?

[–] BestBouclettes@jlai.lu 140 points 1 week ago (4 children)

JWST doing exactly what it was supposed to do ! That's both exciting and terrifying !

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[–] BB84@mander.xyz 93 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (14 children)

The article over-dramatizes the story. This "deeply wrong" discrepancy is less than 10%. CMB measurements predict a Hubble constant of around 68km/s/Mpc. Distance ladder measurements get around 73km/s/Mpc.

Our current understanding of the universe the Lambda-CDM model is still wildly successful and it's more likely that the true correct model of the universe will be a correction/extension to Lambda-CDM rather than a completely new theory (although if it is a completely new theory that would be pretty cool).

[–] vxx@lemmy.world 2 points 6 days ago

Maybe the light does a detour before it reaches the telescopes.

[–] elephantium@lemmy.world 36 points 1 week ago (1 children)

I think you're understating things. The measurements don't have to be 100 km/s/Mpc apart to cause problems for our understanding of the universe. Ruling out measurement error means we have to go back to the drawing board on cosmology. The problem isn't sloppy telescopes or anything -- it's definitely a hole in our current model.

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[–] niktemadur@lemmy.world 17 points 1 week ago

If they wanted to use the term "deeply wrong discrepancy", maybe they should have gone with the difference between the universe's expansion predicted by quantum vacuum energy and the actual, much slower observed rate of expansion.
By "much slower", I mean that the theory and the observations differ by something like one hundred and twenty five (!!!) orders of magnitude.

[–] vrighter@discuss.tchncs.de 16 points 1 week ago (2 children)

I think the deeply wrong part of it is that the difference is now big enough for the error bars to stop overlapping

[–] BB84@mander.xyz 4 points 6 days ago (1 children)

The instrumental error bars are no longer overlapping. But if we imagine all the modifications one could make to Lambda-CDM, then there is still a huge "theory" error bar that subsumes all these.

Basically I'm saying the model is wrong, yes, but it can very much be fixed.

[–] FooBarrington@lemmy.world 2 points 6 days ago (1 children)

But could you make these modifications without diverging from other observations? If it were as easy as you put it, why have scientists been talking about it for decades?

[–] BB84@mander.xyz 1 points 5 days ago

Scientists have came up with countless ways to fix the Hubble tension. But all these modified theories so far are either

contrived
untestable with present day observational instruments
currently being tested
already tested and deemed incompatible with reality.

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[–] Treczoks@lemmy.world 36 points 1 week ago (6 children)

I fully expect scientists of the 25th century to roll our current level of knowledge of the universe in one with flat earth and geocentrism.

[–] pennomi@lemmy.world 16 points 1 week ago (2 children)

But how could light pass through nothing? Surely there must exist a lumeniferous aether!

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[–] LovableSidekick@lemmy.world 28 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (8 children)

To be fair, there's always been something deeply wrong with how most people understand the universe.

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[–] Fourth@mander.xyz 22 points 1 week ago

This website is slop even if it overlaps with reality at times.

[–] grrgyle@slrpnk.net 19 points 1 week ago (21 children)

Cool.

Also, what do folks use to block ads on mobile. I've been using FF with Ublock Origin, but lately it hasn't been cutting it.

[–] Im_old@lemmy.world 20 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Pi-hole on the network

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[–] MMNT@lemmy.ml 19 points 1 week ago

Check which blocking lists you have. I use the same and don't see any ads

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[–] Initiateofthevoid@lemmy.dbzer0.com 18 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week 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.”

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.

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[–] LarmyOfLone@lemm.ee 17 points 1 week ago

James Webb confirmation confirms something is deeply wrong with how we write headlines.

[–] atomicbocks@sh.itjust.works 16 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (4 children)

Am I missing something or is there just no source given in this article? I would really like to be able to read more but I can’t find anything in the recent press releases from the JWST team or through a quick search. It doesn’t even say who the “researchers” are.

Also why is every other sentence bolded? It made it really hard to read.

Edit: It seems that the article is mostly taken from this 2023 NASA blog post. The raisin bread analogy is on Wikipedia.

Even if this isn’t AI slop this is a lazy article.

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[–] Wahots@pawb.social 16 points 1 week ago (1 children)

This is really exciting stuff, tbh. It's kinda amazing that in a world where the frontiers have been settled, most fields have had a century to a thousand years of refinement, there are still areas of science where we have giant gaps in our knowledge, like scientists first discovering gravity, or the circumference of Earth.

Someone, perhaps someone who is already alive, is going to discover new math or observations that fundamentally change how we see the universe, with far reaching implications on cosmic exploration, travel the birth and death of our universe, and (I'm sure) many commercial applications.

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