dark energy – Quanta Magazine

Diminishing Dark Energy May Evade the ‘Swampland’ of Impossible Universes

Steve Nadis — Mon, 19 Aug 2024 14:20:11 +0000

On the morning of April 4, physicists filed into a third-floor meeting room at Harvard University’s Jefferson Laboratory. Word had gotten out that there would be a big announcement from the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) collaboration, a group of physicists who are investigating dark energy — a mysterious, repulsive form of energy that permeates the universe. The meeting room at...

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Dark Energy May Be Weakening, Major Astrophysics Study Finds

Charlie Wood — Thu, 04 Apr 2024 15:00:41 +0000

Physicists have deduced subtle hints that the mysterious “dark” energy that drives the universe to expand faster and faster may be slightly weakening with time. It’s a finding that has the potential to shake the foundations of physics. “If true, it would be the first real clue we have gotten about the nature of dark energy in 25 years,” said Adam Riess, an astrophysicist at Johns Hopkins...

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Fresh X-Rays Reveal a Universe as Clumpy as Cosmology Predicts

Liz Kruesi — Mon, 04 Mar 2024 15:26:00 +0000

Clusters of hundreds or thousands of galaxies sit at the intersections of giant, crisscrossing filaments of matter that form the tapestry of the cosmos. As gravity pulls everything in each galaxy cluster toward its center, the gas that fills the space between the galaxies gets compressed, causing it to heat up and glow in X-rays. The eRosita X-ray telescope, lofted into space in 2019...

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In a ‘Dark Dimension,’ Physicists Search for the Universe’s Missing Matter

Steve Nadis — Thu, 01 Feb 2024 15:40:30 +0000

When it comes to understanding the fabric of the universe, most of what scientists think exists is consigned to a dark, murky domain. Ordinary matter, the stuff we can see and touch, accounts for just 5% of the cosmos. The rest, cosmologists say, is dark energy and dark matter, mysterious substances that are labeled “dark” partly to reflect our ignorance about their true nature.

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Clashing Cosmic Numbers Challenge Our Best Theory of the Universe

Liz Kruesi — Fri, 19 Jan 2024 15:44:49 +0000

In the early 2000s, it seemed that cosmologists had solved the largest and most complex puzzle of all: how the universe works. “There was this amazing moment when all of a sudden, all the pieces in cosmology snapped together,” said J. Colin Hill, a theoretical cosmologist at Columbia University. All the ways of studying the universe — mapping galaxies and their larger structures...

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