Article snippet: There is a crisis brewing in the cosmos, or perhaps in the community of cosmologists. The universe seems to be expanding too fast, some astronomers say. Recent measurements of the distances and velocities of faraway galaxies don’t agree with a hard-won “standard model” of the cosmos that has prevailed for the past two decades. The latest result shows a 9 percent discrepancy in the value of a long-sought number called the Hubble constant, which describes how fast the universe is expanding. But in a measure of how precise cosmologists think their science has become, this small mismatch has fostered a debate about just how well we know the cosmos. “If it is real, we will learn new physics,” said Wendy Freedman of the University of Chicago, who has spent most of her career charting the size and growth of the universe. The Hubble constant, named after Edwin Hubble, the Mount Wilson and Carnegie Observatories astronomer who discovered that the universe is expanding, has ever given astronomers fits. In an expanding universe, the farther something is away from you, the faster it is receding. Hubble’s constant tells by how much. But measuring it requires divining the distances of lights in the sky — stars and even whole galaxies that we can never visit or recreate in the lab. The strategy since Hubble’s day has been to find so-called standard candles, stars or whole galaxies whose distances can be calculated by how bright they look from Earth. But the calibrators themselv... Link to the full article to read more