few years apart
A few billion years apart. Since the speed of light in a vacuum is limited we can actually look into to past. All the way back to the moment the Universe cooled down enough for protons to catch elections to form the first hydrogens atom and the universe became transparent.
You don't see how that is also gross extrapolation prone to heinous errors? We are calculating derivatives while traveling on a curve. We are bending curves into straight lines because the straight lines make the math work. Great, it works. It is also wrong.
I'm sure that those who wrote the papers did make an error examination as no paper will pass peer review without. You know that magic 5σ thing the physics guys are always on about.
Physics isn't feminism where everything passes peer review without questioning.