“Testing Models of Our Universe with the James Webb Space Telescope”
Over the last decade, there has been mounting evidence for what has become known as the ‘Hubble tension’. Local measurements of how fast the universe is expanding – a quantity known as the Hubble constant (named after astronomer Edwin Hubble) – are at odds with those inferred from measurements of the background radiation left over from the Big Bang. If this tension is real, it implies that there is something fundamental missing from our standard model of cosmology. I will describe new results from a major James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) program to improve measurements of the Hubble constant. Relative to the Hubble Space Telescope, JWST is 10 times more sensitive and has 4 times higher resolution in the near-infrared, and it is providing a powerful new means of addressing challenges in previous measurements.