Hubble identifies an unusual wrinkle in the rate of expansion of the universe

Hubble's most important findings on its 32nd birthday 0:50

(CNN) --

Measuring the rate of expansion of the universe was one of the main goals of the Hubble Space Telescope when it launched in 1990.

Over the past 30 years, the space observatory has helped scientists discover and refine that rate of acceleration, as well as discover a mysterious wrinkle that only new physics could resolve.

Hubble has observed more than 40 galaxies that include pulsating stars as well as exploding stars called supernovae to measure even greater cosmic distances.

Both of these phenomena help astronomers mark astronomical distances like mile markers, which have hinted at the rate of expansion.

In the quest to understand how fast our universe is expanding, astronomers already made an unexpected discovery in 1998: "dark energy".

This phenomenon acts as a mysterious repulsive force that speeds up the rate of expansion.

And there's another twist: an unexplained difference between the rate of expansion of the local universe and that of the distant universe just after the Big Bang.

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Scientists don't understand the discrepancy, but acknowledge that it is strange and might require new physics.

"The most accurate measure of the expansion rate of the universe is being obtained from the gold standard of telescopes and cosmic mile markers," said Nobel Laureate Adam Riess of the Space Telescope Science Institute and Distinguished Professor of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, in a statement.

"This is what the Hubble Space Telescope was built for, using the best techniques we know to do it. This is probably Hubble's magnum opus, because it would take another 30 years of Hubble's life to even double this sample size."

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THE WONDERS OF THE UNIVERSE: To grow to its current massive size, the Milky Way probably consumed a dwarf galaxy, Gaia-Enceladus.

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This artist's rendering shows a supernova explosion, which usually has the luminosity of 100 million suns.

The iPTF14hls supernova, which has exploded multiple times, may be the most massive and long-lasting ever observed.

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See that dot between Saturn's rings?

That's Earth in an image from the Cassini mission on April 12.

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NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, using infrared technology, reveals the density of stars in the Milky Way.

According to NASA, the photograph was made by stitching together nine images and contains more than half a million stars.

The star cluster is the densest in the galaxy.

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This photo of Saturn's large icy moon Tethys was taken by NASA's Cassini space mission, which has been sending back some amazing images of the ringed planet.

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This is what the Earth and Moon look like from Mars.

The image is a composite of the best image of Earth and the best image of the Moon taken on November 20, 2016, by NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.

The orbiter's camera, the HiRISE (High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment) camera, takes images in three wavelength bands: infrared, red and blue-green.

Mars was about 127 million miles from Earth when the images were taken.

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PGC 1000714 was initially thought to be an ordinary elliptical galaxy, but closer analysis revealed the incredibly rare discovery of a Hoag-type galaxy.

It has a round core surrounded by two separate rings.

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NASA's Cassini space mission took these images of the planet's mysterious hexagon shape in early December 2016. The hexagon was discovered in images taken by the Voyager spacecraft in the early 1980s.

It is estimated to be wider in diameter than two Earths.

Scientists are still trying to figure out what causes it.

Cassini was launched in 1997 and is nearing the end of its mission.

The probe will plunge into Saturn's atmosphere on September 15, 2017, sending back data until its signal is lost.

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A dead star casts a greenish glow in this Hubble Space Telescope image of the Crab Nebula, located about 6,500 light-years from Earth in the constellation Taurus.

NASA released the image for Halloween 2016 and put the subject in its press release.

The agency said the "ghoulish-looking object still has a pulse."

At the center of the Crab Nebula is the crushed core, or "heart," of an exploded star.

The heart is spinning 30 times a second and producing a magnetic field that generates a trillion volts, NASA said.

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Peering through the thick dust clouds of the galactic bulge, an international team of astronomers has revealed the unusual mix of stars in a stellar cluster known as Terzan 5. The new results indicate that Terzan 5 is one of the primordial building blocks of the bulge, a relic of the early days of the Milky Way.

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An artist's conception of Planet Nine, which would be the farthest planet within our solar system.

Similar orbits of the cluster of extreme objects at the edge of our solar system suggest that a large planet lies there.

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Illustration of the orbits of new and previously known extremely distant objects in the Solar System.

Thope's clustering of most of their orbits indicates that they are likely to be influenced by something huge and very distant, the proposed Planet X.

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Say hello to the dark galaxy Dragonfly 44. Like our Milky Way, it has a halo of spherical clusters of stars around its core.

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A classical nova occurs when a white dwarf star gains matter from its parent star (a red dwarf) over a period of time, causing a thermonuclear reaction at the surface that eventually erupts in a single visible burst.

This creates a 10,000-fold increase in brightness, depicted here in an artist's drawing.

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Gravitational lensing and spatial warping are visible in this Hubble image of nearby and distant galaxies.

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At the center of our galaxy, the Milky Way, researchers discovered an X-shaped structure within a tightly packed group of stars.

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Meet UGC 1382. What astronomers thought was a normal elliptical galaxy (left) was revealed to be a large disk galaxy made up of different parts when viewed with deep ultraviolet optical data (middle and right).

In a complete reversal of the galaxy's normal structure, the center is younger than its outer spiral disk.

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NASA's Hubble Space Telescope captured this image of the Crab Nebula and its "beating heart," which is a neutron star to the right of the two bright stars in the center of this image.

The neutron star pulses 30 times per second.

The colors of the rainbow are visible due to the movement of materials in the nebula that occur during the time lapse of the image.

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The Hubble Space Telescope captured an image of a hidden galaxy that is fainter than Andromeda or the Milky Way.

This low-surface-brightness galaxy, called UGC 477, is more than 110 million light-years away in the constellation Pisces.

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On April 19, NASA released new images of bright craters on Ceres.

This photo shows the Haulani crater, which has evidence of landslides on its rim.

Scientists believe that some craters on the dwarf planet are bright because they are relatively new.

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This illustration shows the millions of dust grains that NASA's Cassini spacecraft has taken as evidence from Saturn.

A few dozen of them appear to have come from beyond our solar system.

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This image from the VLT Telescope at the European Space Observatory's Paranal Observatory in Chile shows an impressive concentration of galaxies known as the Fornax Cluster, which can be found in the Southern Hemisphere.

In the center of this group, in the middle of the three bright spots on the left side of the image, is a cD galaxy, a galactic cannibal that has grown in size by consuming smaller galaxies.

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This image shows the central region of the Tarantula Nebula in the Large Magellanic Cloud.

The dense young star cluster R136, containing hundreds of huge stars, is visible in the lower right of the image taken by the Hubble Space Telescope.

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In March 2016, astronomers published a paper about powerful red flashes from the binary system V404 Cygni in 2015. This illustration shows a black hole, similar to that in V404 Cygni, devouring material from an orbiting star.

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A new map of the Milky Way was released on February 24, 2016, giving astronomers a complete census of the star-forming regions within our own galaxy.

The APEX telescope in Chile captured this image.

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This image shows the elliptical galaxy NGC 4889, embedded deep within the Coma cluster of galaxies.

There is a gigantic supermassive black hole in the center of the galaxy.

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Artist's impression of 2MASS J2126, which takes 900,000 years to orbit its star, a trillion kilometers away.

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Caltech researchers have found evidence of a giant planet tracing a strange, highly elongated orbit in the outer solar system.

The object, dubbed Planet Nine, has a mass around 10 times Earth's and orbits about 20 times farther from the Sun on average than Neptune.

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An international team of astronomers may have discovered the biggest and brightest supernova ever.

The explosion was 570 billion times brighter than the sun and 20 times brighter than all the stars in the Milky Way combined, according to a statement from Ohio State University, which is leading the study.

Scientists are struggling to define the strength of the supernova.

This image shows an artist's impression of the supernova as it would appear from an exoplanet located about 10,000 light-years away.

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Astronomers observed huge ripples of gas being "belched" out of the black hole at the center of NGC 5195, a small galaxy 26 million light-years from Earth.

The team believes that the outburst is a consequence of NGC 5195 interacting with a nearby galaxy.

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An artist's illustration shows a binary black hole found in the quasar at the center of the Markarian 231 galaxy. Astronomers using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope found that the galaxy was powered by two black holes that were "furiously spinning around each other." the space agency said in a press release.

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Artist's impression of what a black hole might look like.

In February, Chinese researchers said they had discovered a super-massive black hole twelve billion times the size of the sun.

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Are there oceans on any of Jupiter's moons?

The Juice probe shown in this artist's impression aims to find out.

Image courtesy of ESA/AOES

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Astronomers have discovered powerful auroras on a brown dwarf that is 20 light-years away.

This is an artist's concept of the phenomenon.

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Venus (below) and Jupiter shine brightly over Matthews, North Carolina, on Monday, June 29.

The apparent close encounter, called a conjunction, has been putting on a dazzling display in the summer sky.

Although the two planets appear close together, they are actually millions of miles apart.

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Jupiter's icy moon Europa may be the best place in the solar system to search for extraterrestrial life, according to NASA.

The moon is about the size of Earth's moon, and there is evidence that it has an ocean under its frozen crust that can hold twice as much water as Earth.

NASA's 2016 budget includes a $30 million request to plan a mission to investigate Europa.

The image was taken by the Galileo spacecraft on November 25, 1999. It is a mosaic of 12 frames and is considered the best image yet of the side of Europa facing Jupiter.

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This nebula, or cloud of gas and dust, is called RCW 34 or Gum 19. The brightest areas you can see are where gas is being heated by young stars.

Eventually the gas burst out like champagne after a bottle is uncorked.

Scientists call this champagne flow.

This new image of the nebula was captured by the European Space Observatory's Very Large Telescope in Chile.

RCW 34 is in the Vela constellation in the southern sky.

The name means "sails of a ship" in Latin.

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The Hubble Space Telescope captured images of Jupiter's three large moons (Io, Callisto, and Europa) passing by rapidly.

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A huge cluster of galaxies known as SDSS J1038+4849 looks like a smiley face in an image captured by the Hubble Telescope.

The two bright eyes are actually two distant galaxies.

And what about the smile and the round face?

That's a result of what astronomers call "strong gravitational lensing."

This happens because the gravitational attraction between the two groups of galaxies is so strong that it distorts the time and space around them.

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Using powerful optics, astronomers have found a planet-like body, J1407b, with rings 200 times the size of Saturn.

This is an artist's rendering of planet J1407b's rings, which are eclipsing a star.

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A patch of stars appears to be missing from this image from the La Silla Observatory in Chile.

But the stars are there behind a cloud of gas and dust called Lynds Dark Nebula 483. The cloud is about 700 light-years from Earth in the constellation Serpens.

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This is the largest Hubble Space Telescope image ever assembled.

It is a portion of the neighboring galaxy, Andromeda (M31).

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NASA has captured a stunning new image of the so-called "Pillars of Creation," one of the space agency's most iconic discoveries.

The giant plumes of cold gas in a small region of the Eagle Nebula were popularized by a similar image taken by the Hubble Space Telescope in 1995.

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Using Hubble, astronomers reconstructed this picture showing a small section of space in the southern hemisphere constellation Fornax.

There are 10,000 galaxies in this deep space image, going back in time to a few hundred million years after the Big Bang.

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The planetary nebula Abell 33 appears as a ring in this image, taken with the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope.

The blue bubble was created when an aged star shed its outer layers and a star in the foreground aligned to create a "diamond engagement ring" effect.

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This long-exposure image from the Hubble Telescope is the deepest ever taken of a group of galaxies.

The cluster, called Abell 2744, contains several hundred galaxies as they appeared 3.5 billion years ago.

The most distant galaxies appear as they did more than 12 billion years ago, not long after the Big Bang.

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NASA's NuSTAR Telescope Array generated the first map of radioactivity in the remains of an exploding star, or supernova.

The blue in this image of Cassiopeia A represents radioactive material.

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A supernova was seen on January 21 in Messier 82, one of the closest large galaxies.

This wide view image was taken on January 22nd.

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Supernova M82, seen here, has been designated SN2014J because it was the tenth supernova detected in 2014. At 11.4 million light-years from Earth, it is the closest Type Ia supernova on record since systematic surveys with telescopes began in the thirties.

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Is it a giant hand waving at us?

It's actually what's left of a star that died and exploded long ago.

Astronomers nicknamed it the "Hand of God."

NuSTAR took this image in high-energy X-rays, shown in blue.

The image was combined with images from another space telescope, the Chandra X-ray Observatory.

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The Hubble Space Telescope captured this image of the Southern Pinwheel Galaxy, one of the largest and closest galaxies of its kind.

The galaxy's center is mysterious, the researchers say, because it has a double nucleus, a supermassive black hole that may be surrounded by an unbalanced disk of stars, giving it the appearance of a dual nucleus.

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Hubble scientists say this is the best view of the Tarantula Nebula, which is located in one of our closest galactic neighbors, the Large Magellanic Cloud.

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Those spots on our sun seem small, but even a moderate-sized dot is about as big as Earth.

They are produced when strong magnetic fields poke through the sun's surface and leave the area cooler compared to the surrounding area.

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In March 2016, astronomers published a paper about powerful red flashes from the binary system V404 Cygni in 2015. This illustration shows a black hole, similar to that in V404 Cygni, devouring material from an orbiting star.

decades of observation

The telescope is named after pioneering astronomer Edwin Hubble, who discovered in the 1920s that the distant clouds of the universe were actually galaxies.

(He died in 1953).

Hubble built on the work of astronomer Henrietta Swan Leavitt, who in 1912 discovered the periods of brightness of pulsating stars called Cepheid variables.

Cepheids act as cosmic landmarks, periodically brightening and dimming in our galaxy and others.

Hubble's work led to the revelation that our galaxy was one of many, forever changing our perspective and place in the universe.

The astronomer continued his work and discovered that distant galaxies seemed to be moving rapidly, suggesting that we live in an expanding universe that started with a big bang.

• A huge comet will pass by the Sun in 2031. This is how the Hubble Space Telescope observed it

The detection of the expansion rate of the universe contributed to the award of the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics, awarded to Saul Perlmutter, Brian P. Schmidt, and Riess "for the discovery of the accelerated expansion of the universe through observations of distant supernovae."

Riess continues to lead SHOES, short for Supernova, H0, for the Dark Energy Equation of State, a scientific collaboration investigating the rate of expansion of the universe.

His team is publishing a paper in

that provides the latest update on the Hubble constant, as the rate of expansion is known.

An unresolved discrepancy

Measuring distant objects has created a "cosmic distance ladder" that can help scientists better estimate the age of the universe and understand its foundations.

Various teams of astronomers using the Hubble telescope have come up with a value for the Hubble constant that is equal to 73, plus or minus 1 kilometer per second per megaparsec.

(A megaparsec is a million parsecs, or 3.26 million light-years.)

"The Hubble constant is a very special number. It can be used to thread a needle from the past to the present for an end-to-end test of our understanding of the universe. This has required an admirable amount of detailed work" , says Licia Verde, cosmologist at the Catalan Institution for Research and Advanced Studies and the Institute of Cosmos Sciences of the University of Barcelona, ​​in a statement.

But the actual predicted expansion rate of the universe is slower than that observed by the Hubble telescope, according to astronomers using the standard cosmological model of the universe (a theory that suggests the components of the Big Bang) and measurements made by the Planck mission. of the European Space Agency between 2009 and 2013.

• The curious selfie of the James Webb telescope from space

Planck, another space observatory, was used to measure the cosmic microwave background, or radiation left over from the Big Bang 13.8 billion years ago.

Scientists on the Planck mission arrived at a Hubble constant of 67.5 or so, or 0.5 kilometers per second per megaparsec.

The James Webb Space Telescope, launched in December, will be able to observe the Hubble landmarks with higher resolution and at greater distances, which could help understand the discrepancy between the two figures.

This presents an exciting challenge to cosmologists who once endeavored to measure the Hubble constant and are now wondering what additional physics might help them unravel a new mystery about the universe.

"I don't really care what the value of the expansion is specifically, but I like to use it to learn about the universe," Riess said.

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