“They,” he said, referring to the other astronomers, “may be right and we have to modify their standard model, but the evidence looks weak to me.”
Dr. Riess and his colleagues have stood by their work, however,
and the plot thickened further in December when a group called H0LiCOW (don’t ask) from the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics in Garching, Germany, reported its own value of 72 for the Hubble constant, also inconsistent with the Planck space mission’s analysis.
Another possibility is that the most popular version of dark energy — known as the cosmological constant, invented by Einstein 100 years ago and then rejected as a blunder — might have to be replaced in the cosmological model by a more virulent and controversial form known as phantom energy, which could cause the universe to eventually expand so fast
that even atoms would be torn apart in a Big Rip billions of years from now.
Michael S. Turner of the University of Chicago said, “If the discrepancy is real, this could be a disruption of the current highly successful standard model of cosmology
and just what the younger generation wants — a chance for big discoveries, new insights and breakthroughs.”
Dr. Riess and his colleague Stefano Casertano got roughly the same answer of 73later
last summer, strengthening the claim for a mismatch of Hubble constants.
Last summer a team led by Adam Riess of Johns Hopkins University
and the Space Telescope Science Institute, using the Hubble Space Telescope and the giant Keck Telescope on Mauna Kea in Hawaii and supernova explosions as the ultimate distance markers, got a value of 73 plus or minus only 2.4 percent for the elusive constant.
We look for something not fitting.”
He added, “Clues about the dark sector or about fundamental physics are in play.”
This is the age of “precision cosmology,” and while everybody agrees
that it is still too soon to tell, the avalanche of data from GAIA and the coming James Webb Space Telescope is just beginning, Dr. Freedman said.