…there are two different ways to measure this cosmic expansion rate, and they don’t agree. One method looks deep into the past by analyzing cosmic microwave background radiation, the faint afterglow of the Big Bang. The other studies Cepheid variable stars in nearby galaxies, whose brightness allows astronomers to map more recent expansion.
You’d expect both methods to give the same answer. Instead, they disagree—by a lot. And this mismatch is what scientists call the Hubble tension…Webb’s data agrees with Hubble’s and completely rules out measurement error as the cause of the discrepancy. It’s now harder than ever to explain away the tension as a statistical fluke. This inconsistency suggests something big might be missing from our understanding of the universe - something beyond current theories involving dark matter, dark energy, or even gravity itself. When the same universe appears to expand at different rates depending on how and where you look, it raises the possibility that our entire cosmological model may need rethinking.
Yes i agree with you that, of course, physicists working on this have to be well aware of general relativity. Still, there is this linear relationship that bothers me for the Hubble parameter.
i should have put more effort in understanding before writing my comment … and this confusion about “two parameters” is nothing of importance for what i try to say in that comment. Sorry if you don’t see anything interesting in what i said.
Any linear relationship in this calculation would be an approximation. They’re useful for intuition and quickly explaining things, but for actual business either the full nonlinear relationship is used, or if the linear approximation is used the approximation error must be bounded by an acceptably small parameter.