Measurement of Hubble Constant: Do Different Cosmological Probes Provide Different Values?

TL;DR

This study compares various methods of measuring the Hubble constant using HST data, revealing statistically significant differences that suggest unknown physical effects or calibration issues may be responsible.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive statistical comparison of different distance ladder methods for H0, highlighting inconsistencies and potential sources of bias.

Findings

Different methods yield significantly different H0 values.

Calibration biases are unlikely to explain the differences.

Unknown physical effects may influence distance measurements.

Abstract

Different measurements of the Hubble constant ($H_{0}$) are not consistent and a tension between the CMB based methods and cosmic distance ladder based methods has been observed. Measurements from various distance based methods are also inconsistent. To aggravate the problem, same cosmological probe (Type Ia SNe for instance) calibrated through different methods also provide different value of $H_{0}$. We compare various distance ladder based methods through the already available unique data obtained from Hubble Space Telescope (HST). Our analysis is based on parametric (T-test) as well as non-parametric statistical methods such as the Mann-Whitney U test and Kolmogorov-Smirnov test. Our results show that different methods provide different values of $H_0$ and the differences are statistically significant. The biases in the calibration would not account for these differences as the data has been taken from a single telescope with common calibration scheme. The unknown physical effects or issues with the empirical relations of distance measurement from different probes could give rise to these differences.