Wendy Freedman at the Information Universe conference, introduced by Tamara Davis.
“The Hubble constant … is a measure of how fast the universe is expanding at the current time. We find ourselves with a discrepancy. Now, there are several possibilities: one is that there is an error in one or both of the experiments, or both measurements could actually be correct, and it’s telling us something about the Universe. … our standard model makes a prediction, and we’re seeing cracks in this prediction. So it is possible that we are missing something in this overall picture. We don’t have the final answer. But that’s exciting; the opportunity to learn something new.”
Wendy Freedman in her interview: The Hubble Constant measurement mystery.
Wendy Freedman is a CanadianAmerican astronomer, now the John & Marion Sullivan University Professor of Astronomy and Astrophysics at The University of Chicago. Freedman was coleader of an international team of 30 astronomers to carry out the Hubble Space Telescope Key Project, a program aiming to establish the distance scale of the Universe and measure the current expansion rate, a quantity known as the Hubble constant. She is known as the director of the Carnegie Observatories in Pasadena, California, and Las Campanas, Chile. Her principal research interests are in observational cosmology, focusing on measuring both the current and past expansion rates of the universe, and on characterizing the nature of dark energy.