Washington DC: The United States' NASA (National Aeronautics and Space Administration) has found that the rate of expansion of the universe is faster than what was believed before. NASA added that something weird is going on in the universe, NDTV reports.
The new data from NASA's Hubble Telescope has suggested that the universe is expanding at nearly 73 kilometres per second per megaparsec instead of the earlier estimate of 67.5 kilometres per second per megaparsec.
Nobel laureate Adam Riess of the Space Telescope Science Institute and the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, said that we are getting the most precise measurement of the expansion rate for the universe from the gold standard telescopes and cosmic mile markers.
However, the new finding has prompted scientists to start over their assessment on the matter. They are waiting for more data from the new James Webb Space Telescope to gather more information.
Scientists gathered the data from "milepost markers" set by Hubble Telescope in space and time. The "milepost markers" are used to track the rate of expansion by observing how they are moving away from the observer. Since its launch in 1990, Hubble has calibrated more than 40 "milepost markets".
NDTV reports that the studies on the expansion of the universe were started in 1920 with data by the astronomers Edwin P Hubble and Georges Lemaitre. Hubble had observed that galaxies outside Milky Way are moving away from it, and the further they are from us, the faster they are moving away. Science has pursued the matter since then to understand the phenomena of expansion of the universe.
Hubble Telescope is one of the most powerful space-based telescopes in assisting scientists in unfurling the mysteries of the universe. It is at an approximate altitude of 540km above the Earth and orbits it once every 95.42 minutes.