The News
The universe appears to be expanding faster than expected, and scientists hope the discovery could lead to new physics.
The finding that distant galaxies tend to be moving away was a key piece of evidence for the Big Bang theory. Then, in 2011, data from the Hubble Space Telescope suggested that distant galaxies were receding faster than predicted. Now, new observations from the James Webb Space Telescope appear to have confirmed those findings, suggesting that our model of the universe might be wrong.
Physicists, unusually, are desperate to find errors in their hypotheses: Relativity and quantum mechanics, the subject’s main frameworks, are incredibly useful for predicting the world but are mutually incompatible, so finding an error in one or both could help unite the fields.