Astronomers Wendy Freedman, Robert Kennicutt, and Jeremy Mould led the Hubble Space Telescope Key Project on the Extragalactic Distance Scale, a painstaking ten-year-long effort that resolved the decades-long dispute about the value of the Hubble constant, one of the most important measurements in astronomy. The project’s findings have not only effectively determined the age of the universe (about 14 billion years), but have also enabled scientists to more accurately investigate other profound questions about the birth, evolution, and composition of the universe. |
