New observations from the James Webb Space Telescope suggest that a new feature in the universe—not a flaw in telescope measurements—may be behind the decade-long mystery of why the universe is expanding faster today than it did in its infancy billions of years ago.

The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has provided a stunning new glimpse into the cosmos, revealing findings that challenge one of the most persistent mysteries in modern astrophysics. For over a decade,

These instruments, like the Hubble Space Telescope, reported a value of around 73 km/s/Mpc. The difference between these numbers is known as the Hubble Tension. "The discrepancy between the observed expansion rate of the universe and the predictions of the standard model suggests that our understanding of the universe may be incomplete,

When the James Webb Telescope came online in 2021, it promised to give a clearer picture of the universe that could help cosmologists better measure some of these distances and therefore the expansion rate. But the high-resolution images thus far have confirmed that the tension persists.

The James Webb telescope spent another year collecting instantly iconic space imagery. Here are some of our favorites.