If measurements point to some sort of incongruity, questioning the accuracy of one's ruler is a fools trap. Altering the rulers to remove incongruities results in a spiral of compromises, internal debates that don't result in progress. If one suspects that the rulers are wrong, the answer is to build a better ruler. Not to arbitrarily chop bits off until the difficult observations go away.

Alternatives: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_non-profit_space_age...

But the cuts go far beyond that, to things that are less showy but with more direct effects on the lives of people. Tens of thousands of jobs have been lost, with microscopic effects on the bottom line, but with myriad small effects on our parks, our roads, even national security.

Space is the "charismatic mega fauna" of the budget, but the whole "ecosystem" is ravaged. It must be saved, but take it as an indicator of just how much damage has been done. Spare a thought and a word for the NIH, the Fish and Wildlife Service, and the Social Security administrators whose jobs are not glamorous but nonetheless critical to people who depend on them.

The rest of the cuts are around propulsion systems and mars science missions. The administration and some parts of NASA see the commercial segment becoming more developed and more capable and are hoping they will be able to fill the gap. This also accelerates the plan to retire the ISS and move to commercial orbital platforms.

Interestingly this budget does allocate $646 million more to exploration in 2025 than it did in 2024. Showing a shift in priorities from Earth based science missions to full manned missions returning to the Moon and eventually to Mars.

As is typical, the tolerances given are sigma values for an assumed normal distribution, not the width of a uniform distribution. The disagreement is less than five sigma, so (in the domain of physics) the disagreement is not considered significant enough to be a high-confidence indicator of new physics.

It's a bit of a misnomer though, because it's only constant through space, not time. At the time of discovery it was assumed to be constant in time, too.

I'm not a physicist, but from my understanding, the situation is a bit more complicated than the phrasing in your question suggests.

Observation #1: The light from far-away galaxies is redshifted (spectral lines are a bit off from where we'd expect them to be). This suggests that these galaxies are moving away from us. The farther away the galaxy, the more it is redshifted. This suggests that the farther away the galaxy, the faster it is moving. Observations indicate that the recession speed is directly proportional to distance.

This observation is consistent with general relativity, which suggests an expanding universe with homogeneous mass.

But on a smaller scale, gravitational binding somehow takes over, and on even smaller scale, things like electromagnetic and nuclear interactions start having a greater impact, and that's why the Milky Way isn't itself expanding. For that matter, even Andromeda (0.8 Mpc) is too close to be affected by Hubble-style expansion, which only becomes observable at the multi-megaparsec scale.

Imagine inflating a balloon onto which you've painted dots. All the dots move apart. But the ones furthest apart move apart faster than those close together. This is how you know the dots aren't just moving in their local environment, the entire space is expanding (everywhere).

(If you want a 1D representation, move your fingers apart at a constant rate. Consider how much further apart your pinky and index finger are compared with your middle and ring finger. That wouldn't happen if you just make a Spock hand.)