Dark energy findings could rewrite our understanding of the universe and its fate: “Cusp of a major discovery”
Scientists are blaming the nature of a mysterious force Dark energythe fate of the universe is undecided.
Powerful – It accounts for nearly 70% of the universe. And it’s powerful – it pushes all stars and galaxies away at a faster rate.
Now, scientists are getting closer to understanding how they behave. The biggest problem is that this dark energy is a constant force, which is an idea originally introduced Albert Einstein In his theory of relativity, whether the power is weakening, is a surprising wrinkle that was temporarily proposed last year.
The result was presented at a meeting American Sports Society Wednesday reinforced the situation where the troops were weakening, although scientists are not sure and they still haven’t figured out what that means for their rest of their understanding of the universe.
The latest discovery comes from an international research collaboration that is creating three-dimensional maps to see how galaxies spread across the universe’s history and gathered over 11 billion years of history. Carefully tracking the way galaxies move helps scientists understand the power of moving them.
Called Dark energy spectrometer (DESI), the collaboration released its first analysis of 6 million galaxies and quasars last year, now adds more data to bring the count to nearly 15 million. Their updated results, including other measurements – exploding stars, the remaining light of the young universe, and the distortion of the galaxy’s shape – support the idea that last year suggests that it may be fading.
NSF’s Noirrab via AP
“From a very surprising discovery to almost a moment, we had to abandon how we view cosmology and start over,” said Bhuvnesh Jain, a cosmologist who is not involved in the research at the University of Pennsylvania.
Alexie Leauthaud-Harnett, a spokesman for the Desi collaboration, called the new observation “deeply appealing.”
“It’s exciting that we could be at the forefront of a major discovery about dark energy and the fundamental nature of the universe,” she said in a statement.
It is not the time to completely rule out the idea that dark energy is constant, because new results are still shy than the gold standard level required for statistics to prove physics. The collaboration aims to map about 50 million galaxies and quasars before the end of the 2026 survey.
“We want to see several different collaborations with similar measurements to ensure dark energy is weakening,” said cosmologist Kris Pardo and the University of Southern California.
“Great Tightening”
If dark energy is constant, our universe may continue to expand forever, becoming colder, lonely and still, scientists say.
If the energy of darkness disappears over time, which seems reasonable, then the universe may one day stop expanding and eventually collapse in what is called the “Great Crusade.” It doesn’t seem like the most pleasant fate, but it offers some closure, says Mustapha ishak-Boushaki, a cosmologist and research collaborator at the University of Texas at Dallas.
“Now, it’s all possible to end,” he said. “We think it’s a good thing or a bad thing? I don’t know.”
Other efforts around the world focus on dark energy and aim to release their own data in the coming years, including Euclid missions from the European Space Agency and the Vera C. rubin Observatory in Chile.
The ESA’s $1.5 billion Euclid Space Telescope was launched in 2023 and is equipped with a near-perfect 3-inch wide main mirror and two instruments: a 600-megapixel visible light camera and a 64-megapixel infrared imaging spectrometer. The telescope’s field of view is about twice that of a full moon.
It takes six years to complete its sky map, with 100 gigabytes of compressed data per day or an estimate of 70,000 tons generated during the mission process, and an unimaginable 70,000 tons.
Contributed to this report.
