Two international teams of astronomers, using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, are reporting major progress in converging on an accurate measurement of the Universe's rate of expansion -- a value which has been debated for over half a century. These new results yield ranges for the age of the Universe from 9-12 billion years, and 11-14 billion years, respectively. These values don't fit with earlier estimates based on the rate of white dwarf's cooling that give ages above 15000 million years.
One team, led by Wendy Freedman, has obtained a value for the Hubble constant of 80 km/s/Mpc. Two months ago, a second team, led by Allan Sandage, reported a slower expansion rate of 57 km/sec/Mpc.