The Universe is expanding more rapidly than previously believed.

The Universe is expanding and that expansion is continuing at an increasingly rapid rate — but new findings from Hubble indicate that this expansion may be more rapid than we realised.

Astronomers believe that new measurements from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope confirm that the Universe is expanding about 9% faster than expected based on its trajectory seen shortly after the big bang.

This means that the Hubble constant (H0) — the measure of the current expansion rate of the Universe, named after Edwin Hubble, the man who first observed said expansion — needs adjustment from its current figure of
~2 X 10-¹⁸ s-¹.

Adam Riess, Bloomberg Distinguished Professor of Physics and Astronomy at The Johns Hopkins University, Nobel Laureate, says of the disparity between old calculations and these new findings: “This mismatch has been growing and has now reached a point that is really impossible to dismiss as a fluke. This is not what we expected.”

The new measurements — published April 25 in the Astrophysical Journal Letters — reduce the chances that the disparity is an accident from 1 in 3,000 to only 1 in 100,000 and…