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How a Dispute over a Single Number Became a Cosmological Crisis | Scientific American

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Two divergent measurements of how fast the universe is expanding cannot both be right. Something must give—but what? BY RICHARD PANEK Mark Ross Studios Toward the end of the 20th century, the standard cosmological model seemed complete. Full of mysteries, yes. Brimming with fertile areas for further research, definitely. But on the whole it held together: the universe consisted of approximately two-thirds dark energy (a mysterious something that is accelerating the expansion of the universe), maybe a quarter dark matter (a mysterious something that determines the evolution of structure in the universe), and 4 or 5 percent “ordinary” matter (the stuff of us—and of planets, stars, galaxies and everything else we had always thought, until the past few decades, constituted the universe in its entirety). It added up. Not so fast. Or, more accurately, too fast. In recent years a discrepancy has emerged between two ways of measuring the rate of the universe’s expansion, a value called the Hub

March 1, 2020 14 min read Add Us On Google Add SciAm How a Dispute over a Single Number Became a Cosmological Crisis Two divergent measurements of how fast the universe is expanding cannot both be right. Something must give-but what? By Richard Panek Mark Ross Studios Toward the end of the 20th century, the standard cosmological model seemed complete. Full of mysteries, yes. Brimming with fertile areas for further research, definitely. But on the whole it held together: the universe consisted of approximately two-thirds dark energy (a mysterious something that is accelerating the expansion of

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