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LiveScience
LiveScience
Ben Turner

James Webb telescope confirms we have no idea why the universe is growing the way it is

A dense cluster of bright stars, each with six large and two small diffraction spikes, due to the telescope’s optics. They have a variety of sizes depending on their brightness and distance from us in the cluster, and different colors reflecting different types of star. Patches of billowing red gas can be seen in and around the cluster, lit up by the stars. Small stars in the cluster blend into a background of distant stars and galaxies on black.

New observations made by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) have further cemented one of the most bizarre observations in all of physics — that the universe expanded at different speeds across varying stages of its lifetime.

The conundrum, referred to as the Hubble tension, has fueled a debate among astronomers that could alter or even upend the field altogether.

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