Our understanding of the universe's expansion is really wrong

The universe just got even more confusing. Last week, the biggest ever 3D map of our galaxy was released as part of the second batch of data from the European Space Agency’s Gaia satellite. The long-awaited data dump revealed the location and brightness of some 1.7 billion stars in the Milky Way.

Now the first analysis of the data has crystallised our confusion about the rate at which the universe is expanding.

We have two ways to determine the speed of the universe’s inflation,…