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New age of precision cosmology

Jul 1, 1999

At a recent press conference, a Hubble Space Telescope Key Project team announced that it had completed an eight-year effort to measure the Hubble constant, the rate at which the universe is currently expanding. The team leaders, Wendy Freedman of the Carnegie Observatories in the US and Jeremy Mould of the Australian National University, claimed that their measurement is accurate to within 10%, and added that "after all these years, we are finally entering an era of precision cosmology". Such a statement might reasonably raise eyebrows among non-astronomers - after all, measuring anything fundamental to a precision of 10% hardly seems worth crowing about. Moreover, many others have claimed to measure the Hubble constant to this accuracy before, so what's new?

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