New research suggests that a troubling disparity in the rate of expansion of the universe, known as the Hubble constant, may arise from the fact Earth sits in a vast underdense region of the cosmos.

The issue has come to be known as the "Hubble tension." It arises from the fact that there are two ways to calculate the Hubble constant at the universe's current age, but these methods do not agree.

The team behind this research suggests that this issue arises from the fact that our galaxy, the Milky Way, sits in an underdense region or "supervoid." That would mean that space would appear to expand faster in this "Hubble bubble," officially known as the Keenan-Barger-Cowie (KBC) supervoid (also slightly unflatteringly referred to as "the local hole") thus skewing our observations.