It’s been scarcely a decade since science discovered that the universe is not only expanding but expanding faster and faster, theorizing further that the culprit is a strange unknown something called dark energy. Dark energy is the biggest part of our universe, making up nearly three-quarters of everything, and its repulsive power should be enormous to counteract the gravitational pull between “normal” cosmic stuff.New findings from NASA, courtesy of its space-based Galaxy Evolution Explorer and Australia’s Anglo-Australian Telescope appear to strongly validate the dark energy theory, rebutting an alternate theory suggesting that Einstein is wrong and gravity acts in an opposite, repulsive manner over long distances. Nope, it’s dark matter that has the universe on a runaway train toward a very real end-times of cold, nearly featureless space.“The action of dark energy is as if you threw a ball up in the air, and it kept speeding upward into the sky faster and faster,” says Chris Blake of the Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne, Australia and also author of a new paper describing the results in a NASA press release. “The results tell us that dark energy is a cosmological constant, as Einstein proposed. If gravity were the culprit, then we wouldn’t be seeing these constant effects of dark energy throughout time.”Maybe you’re wondering how we can actually measure any of this stuff, how we here on this speck on a speck on a speck on a speck of sand on the universe’s massive beach can infer such a thing. Initially the observation came from observing supernovae, the bright constant lights in the universe that we can measure adequately enough to tell what they are doing in relation to Earth. They were indeed hauling ass away from us.In the new study, researchers basically made a massive 3-D map of galaxies in the very distant universe. 200,000 of them, in fact, reaching back nearly 7 billion years, or the entire cosmic time-span that should have been dominated by dark energy. Using ancient sound-wave imprints, they were able to come up with a “standard ruler” allowing measurements of how fast the pairs are moving away.As with the earlier research, the answer seems to be that everything is hurling out into the darkness quite fast. In cosmic terms.Connected:
Reach this writer at michaelb@motherboard.tv.Image:NASA
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