Institute for Advanced Study/Princeton University Joint Astrophysics Colloquium

The accuracy in the direct measurement of distances to galaxies has continued to improve dramatically over the past decade. Local measurements of the Hubble constant based on Hubble and Spitzer Space Telescope observations of astrophysical standard candles -- Cepheids and Type Ia supernovae -- have converged on a value of about 73 km/sec/Mpc with an uncertainty of 2-3%. At the same time, estimates assuming a Lambda-CDM standard model and fitting highly precise measurements of cosmic microwave background fluctuations have yielded a value of Ho = 67 km/sec/Mpc. The two methods disagree at approximately the 3-sigma level. The reason for this discrepancy is not understood at present, and new data have only increased the tension. If real, the disagreement could be signaling missing physics in the standard model; for example, additional dark radiation. Major efforts are ongoing to improve further the accuracy in the local measurements, including developing other techniques to test the Cepheid distance scale. In the near future JWST and Gaia will provide a path to measuring Ho to 1%, comparable to the precision in CMB measurements.