Credit: NASA Goddard Space Flight Center via mathscholar
The CosmoVerse collaboration has just released a major white paper (arXiv:2504.01669, accepted in Physics of the Dark Universe) that takes a deep look at the biggest unresolved tensions in modern cosmology.
The most famous of these is the Hubble tension: measurements of the expansion rate from the early Universe (cosmic microwave background) don’t line up with local, late-time measurements (supernovae, Cepheids, etc.). But that’s not the only mystery. The paper also reviews mismatches in large-scale structure and weak lensing data, among others.
Researchers see two big possibilities for what’s causing these cosmic puzzles. One is that it all comes down to systematic effects, things like tiny calibration mistakes, tricky astrophysical modeling, or hidden biases in how different telescopes gather and process their data. The other is much more exciting: new physics. That could mean our standard model of the Universe (ΛCDM) is incomplete, with possibilities like a changing form of dark energy, new kinds of neutrino behaviour, or something entirely unexpected.
Right now, no single explanation ties everything together neatly. That’s why the white paper calls for better cross-checks between independent experiments, smarter ways to deal with systematic errors, and new data from upcoming missions like Euclid, Rubin, and JWST, which may finally help untangle these mysteries .
Reference:
Di Valentino, E., et al. (2025). The CosmoVerse white paper: Addressing observational tensions in cosmology with systematics and fundamental physics (arXiv:2504.01669). arXiv. https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.01669
