A team of astronomers has calculated the universe seems to be expanding faster than what scientists previously figured.
If the new research is right, science's basic understanding of what's been happening to the universe in the past 13.8 billion years could be off kilter.
"Things don't match up," Nobel laureate and study lead author Adam Riess of the Space Telescope Science Institute said.
Astronomers used the Hubble Space Telescope to measure the distance of 2400 stars to calculate the rate the universe was expanding. The number they came up with was 5 to 9 per cent faster than other scientifically accepted measurements that calculate the expansion rate based on cosmic background radiation from 380,000 years after the so-called Big Bang. The new study was released on Thursday by NASA and is to be published in The Astrophysical Journal.
Either one set of calculations is wrong - which outside scientists say is the most likely possibility, though they can't find something wrong yet - or the expansion rate has sped up since 13.8 billion years ago.
And if that's the case, as Riess advocates, then our understanding of the universe is not right.
Riess, who won the 2011 Nobel in physics for proving in 1998 that the universe is accelerating, and co-author Alex Filippenko of Berkeley said there were many possible explanations for why the universe was expanding faster now. It could be that there was a mystery particle, what scientists call a sterile neutrino, which hadn't been seen yet but could change calculations to make the cosmic calculations balance out. It could be that dark energy was increasing. It could be the universe was more curved than theorised. And it could be that Einstein's general relativity wasn't quite right when we looked at the whole universe.
Or it could be the measurements were off.
"There's potentially something very exciting, very interesting that the data are trying to tell us about the universe," Filippenko said.
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