What is the dark energy9/11/2023 And there are other theories, which are even more exotic. Yes, that sounds totally woo-woo, thanks Universe, Deepak Chopra crazy talk, but it might explain the repulsive force that makes up most of the Universe. Perhaps from virtual particles popping in and out of existence in the vacuum of space.Īnother possibility is a phenomenon called Quintessence, a negative energy field that pervades the entire Universe. And the more space there is, the more outward pressure you get. Maybe just one of the features of space itself is that it pushes stuff away. Once astronomers figured out the Universe was actually expanding, he threw the idea out. It was a way to explain a static Universe that really should be expanding or contracting. Einstein described an idea he called the cosmological constant. But as with dark matter, they have absolutely no clue what it is. (Ferdinand Schmutzer, Public Domain)Īstronomers know that dark energy exists. ESA’s Planck spacecraft performed an even more careful analysis and pegged that number at 68.3% of the Universe. NASA’s Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe studied the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation of the Universe for 7 years, and put the amount of dark energy at 72.8% of the Universe. Since this amazing, Nobel prize winning discovery, astronomers have used several other methods to verify this mind-bending reality of the Universe. That’s like trying to calculate how quickly apples fall from trees and finding that they actually fly off into the sky, faster and faster. In the immortal words of Isaac Asimov, “the most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not ‘Eureka’, but ‘That’s Funny’” Instead of finding that the expansion of the Universe was slowing down, they discovered that it’s speeding up. But the question was, how fast was it slowing down? Would it slow to a halt and maybe even reverse direction? So, what did they discover? So if you measure the brightness of a Type 1a supernova, you know roughly how far away it is.Īstronomers assumed the expansion was slowing down. The trick is that these always explode with roughly the same amount of energy. The white dwarf siphons material off of its binary partner, and when it reaches 1.6 times the mass of the Sun, it explodes. While most supernovae are just massive stars, Type 1a are white dwarf stars that exist in a binary system.
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