Illinois and UChicago Physicists Develop a New Method for Measuring Cosmic Expansion
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A team of astrophysicists, cosmologists, and physicists has developed a novel way to compute the Hubble constant using gravitational waves. As our capability to observe gravitational waves improves in the future, this new method could be used to make even more accurate measurements of the Hubble constant, bringing scientists closer to resolving the Hubble tension.
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Illinois and UChicago Physicists Develop a New Method for Measuring Cosmic Expansion By Matthew Williams - March 05, 2026 12:03 AM UTC | Cosmology For about a century, scientists have known that the Universe is in a state of constant expansion. In honor of the scientists who definitively showed this, this expansion has come to be known as the Hubble Constant (or Hubble-Lemaitre Constant). Today, scientists use two main techniques to measure the rate of expansion: the Cosmic Microwave Background and the Cosmic Distance Ladder. The former relies on redshift measurements of the CMB, the relic radiation left over from the Big Bang, while the latter relies on parallax and redshift measurements using variable stars and supernovae (aka "standard candles"). The only problem is that the two methods don't agree, leading to what is known as the "Hubble Tension." This problem is considered one of the greatest cosmological mysteries facing scientists today. Luckily, new methods are emerging that could help resolve this "tension" and bring order to the Standard Model of Cosmology. In a recent study , a team of astrophysicists, cosmologists, and physicists from the University of Illinois and the University of Chicago has proposed a new method using the tiny ripples in spacetime known as gravitational waves . The study was led by Bryce Cousins, an NSF Graduate Research Fellow from the Institute of Gravitation and the Cosmos at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. He was joined by multiple colleagues from the IGC, as well as researchers from the Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics and the Enrico Fermi Institute at the University of Chicago. Their study, " Stochastic Siren: Astrophysical gravitational-wave background measurements of the Hubble constant ," appeared on Jan. 16th in the Physical Review Letters. Scientists hoping to resolve the Hubble Tension have proposed several solutions, ranging from Early Dark Energy and interactions between Dark Matter and neutrinos to...
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