New observations made by the Hubble space telescope suggest that some of our ideas about the Big Bang, the explosion that started the universe, may need revising.

A team from the University of Arizona has obtained a Hubble image of a distant galaxy, designated PG 115+080, seen through a much nearer galaxy.

PG 115+080 is eight billion light years away. The closer galaxy, three billion light years distant, acts as a 'gravitational lens' bending light so that the picture we see of PG 115+080 consists of several distorted images.

This is useful to astronomers because it gives them the chance to do some simple geometry to measure distances across the universe based on the path that the light in each image has travelled

The good news is that using the new Hubble image, it is possible to measure how fast the universe is expanding. The new figure agrees with previous estimates.

The bad news is that the big bang cannot easily explain this observed rate of expansion with the matter the cosmos seems to contain.

So it seems that the Big Bang theory needs patching up. There are three possible ways to do this but each adjustment is unpalatable to astronomers.