"The rate of the expansion of the universe, the Hubble parameter, is constant and can be either positive or zero at the event horizons of black holes," Poplawski said.

A new theory of quantum gravity, which attempts to unite quantum physics with Einstein's relativity, could help solve the puzzle of the universe's expansion, a theoretical paper suggests.

That by itself is good work, but the result was surprising. The value for the Hubble parameter they got was about 73 km/s per megaparsec, which is higher than the "accepted" value of 69.3.