What methods are used to measure cosmic distances?

[Romulo Binuya]

How do astronomers measure cosmic distance, say 7 billion light-years?
http://www.space.com/17399-gamma-ray-photons-quantum-spacetime.html

 

[mfb]

With various method for different distance scales -> cosmic distance ladder

The title of the space.com article is very misleading. The observations are perfectly in agreement with theoretical physics. They might disagree with some specific proposal for new physics. So what? There are so many proposed modifications of physics, most of them have to be wrong.