The Hubble Space Telescope might be best known by the public for the beautiful images of space it captures, but it is most famous among astronomers for producing groundbreaking insights into the expansion of the universe. Before the telescope was launched, scientists knew that the universe was expanding, but they didn’t know how fast this expansion was happening. Findings from Hubble in the 1990s pinned this figure down accurately for the first time.
That doesn’t mean the work is done though. By the 2000s, the estimate for the Hubble constant was fairly accurate, at 72 kilometers per second per megaparsec, but this had an error of plus or minus 8. Since then, this figure has been refined more and more, with a recent finding of 74.03 in 2019. “This is what the Hubble Space Telescope was built to do, using the best techniques we know to do it. This is likely Hubble’s magnum opus, because it would take another 30 years of Hubble’s life to even double this sample size,” said Adam Riess, lead author of the study, in a statement. “You are getting the most precise measure of the expansion rate for the universe from the gold standard of telescopes and cosmic mile markers.
However, even at this accuracy, there is still a discrepancy between this number and that predicted by data from the earliest universe, which is measured by looking at the cosmic microwave background. These results predict that the Hubble constant should be around 67.
Source: Entertainment Trends (entertainmenttrends.net)
We all know is expanding, I want to know what is it expanding into?
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