The universe may be a billion years younger than we thought.

The universe may be a billion years younger than we thought.

Corey S. Powell

"There's currently no consistent story that works for all our cosmological data," says Princeton University astrophysicist Jo Dunkley, who has extensively analyzed the Planck results. "That means there is fascinating work to be done, to see if there is something out there that can explain all of it."
The "tension" reminds scientists of just how much they still don't understand about the underlying laws of nature. Dunkley points to the ghostly particles known as neutrinos, which are extremely abundant throughout space. "We measure neutrinos in the lab and put them in our cosmological model assuming that they are behaving just as we expect them to, but we simply don't know if that's true," she says. "I wouldn't find it surprising if dark matter turned out to be more complicated than we think, too."

Then there's the enigma of dark energy. "We have no good ideas for what it is. Perhaps there are also elements completely missing from the model side, still to be discovered," Freedman says. Theorists have no shortage of ideas: new types of dark energy, new fields, new particles.