Sandage slashes the Hubble constant to 75, further increasing the distance scale. A lower Hubble constant implies that the universe is expanding slowly and that it has taken a longer time to reach its current size. Sandage and Tammann chip away at the number, arriving at a value of around 50. De Vaucouleurs and van den Bergh, Sandage's primary sparring partners, reach values around 100. A number of younger astronomers, among them Brent Tully, Richard Fisher, Marc Aaronson, Jeremy Mould, John Huchra, Rob Kennicutt, Barry Madore, and Wendy Freedman, enter the field and begin to derive values between 50 and 100.
Astronomers realize that they have hit a cosmological brick wall.
To obtain an accurate value for the Hubble constant, astronomers recognize that they must peer farther across space. The telescope is expected to collect Cepheids in galaxies 10 times farther away than ground-based telescopes can spot them. This preliminary observation establishes the distance to the cluster as about 56 million light-years and a Hubble constant of 80. In 1996 a separate team led by Sandage reports a value of 57, and subsequently a value of 59. The Freedman, Mould, and Kennicutt team announces its final measurement for the universe's expansion rate.