NASA Hubble Space Telescope hits new milestone in mystery of universe's expansion rate - Fox News

The Hubble Space Telescope captures the birth of one of Neptune's ‘Great Dark Spot’ storms.

NASA announced Thursday that its Hubble Space Telescope (HST) has calibrated more than 40 "milepost markers" of space and time.

The mile markers help scientists measure the expansion rate of the universe and astronomers have found – using data from the HST and other telescopes – a discrepancy between the expansion rate as measured in the local universe compared to independent observations following the big bang.

The expansion rate of the universe is called the "Hubble constant," after Edwin Hubble. .

The agency also explained that the expansion rate of the universe was predicted to be slower than what Hubble actually sees, with a lower value for the Hubble constant calculated using the Standard Cosmological Model of the Universe and measurements by the European Space Agency's Planck mission than the SH0ES team's estimate

Nobel Laureate Adam Riess of the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) and the Johns Hopkins University, who leads SH0ES, said that – given the large Hubble sample size of mile markers – there is only a one-in-a-million chance astronomers are wrong