Artemis II has reached its maximum distance from Earth.
On the far side of the Moon, 252,756 miles away, Reid, Victor, Christina, and Jeremy have now traveled farther from Earth than any humans in history and now begin their journey home. Before they left, they said they hoped this mission would be forgotten, but it will be remembered as the moment people started to believe that America can once again do the near-impossible and change the world.
Congratulations to this incredible crew and the entire NASA team, our international and commercial partners, but this mission isn’t over until they’re under safe parachutes, splashing down into the Pacific.
The hypothesis was presented at the 2025 National Astronomy Meeting (NAM) of the Royal Astronomical Society in Durham and could resolve one of the greatest enigmas of modern cosmology: the so-called Hubble tension, a discrepancy between measurements of the universe's expansion in its early stages and current observations. Furthermore, this model could help confirm the true age of the cosmos, estimated to be approximately 13.8 billion years.
The Hubble constant, first proposed by Edwin Hubble in 1929, is a fundamental value for understanding the universe's expansion. It is calculated by measuring the distance between celestial objects and the speed at which they are moving away from us. But there is a problem: when scientists extrapolate measurements from the early universe (based on the standard cosmological model) to the present, they predict an expansion rate slower than that observed in more recent and nearby regions. This discrepancy is known as the Hubble tension.
Dr. Indranil Banik, from the University of Portsmouth, explained that a possible solution to this inconsistency is that our galaxy is near the center of a vast local void, a region with significantly lower matter density than the universe's average.
If we were inside a void, the gravity of denser external regions would pull matter outward, causing the void to become even emptier over time, Banik explained. This effect would make nearby objects move away from us at a speed greater than expected, giving the impression of a locally accelerated expansion.