Astronomers believe that new measurements from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope confirm that the Universe is expanding about 9% faster than expected based on its trajectory seen shortly after the big bang.

This means that the Hubble constant (H0) — the measure of the current expansion rate of the Universe, named after Edwin Hubble, the man who first observed said expansion — needs adjustment from its current figure of ~2 X 10-¹⁸ s-¹.

Adam Riess, Bloomberg Distinguished Professor of Physics and Astronomy at The Johns Hopkins University, Nobel Laureate, says of the disparity between old calculations and these new findings: “This mismatch has been growing and has now reached a point that is really impossible to dismiss as a fluke. This is not what we expected.”