What is dark energy?
The bad news is: Nobody knows. The good news is that grant-hungry physicists can instantly boost their chances of success by inserting "dark energy" into the title of a proposal.
The term "dark energy" is one that cosmologists dreamed up to explain a strange, repulsive type of gravity that is blowing up the universe, causing it to grow faster as it ages. Since the 1930s, astronomers have known that the universe is expanding, but they believed that gravity was slowing down that growth because galaxies tug on each other.
In 1998, however, studies of distant stellar explosions, called supernova, indicated that they were farther away than they should be. Something, it seemed, was causing the cosmic expansion to speed up.
"It’s as if you threw a ball up in the air and, just when you would expect to see it turn and fall back, it starts moving upward further and faster..."
Full article here...
The term "dark energy" is one that cosmologists dreamed up to explain a strange, repulsive type of gravity that is blowing up the universe, causing it to grow faster as it ages. Since the 1930s, astronomers have known that the universe is expanding, but they believed that gravity was slowing down that growth because galaxies tug on each other.
In 1998, however, studies of distant stellar explosions, called supernova, indicated that they were farther away than they should be. Something, it seemed, was causing the cosmic expansion to speed up.
"It’s as if you threw a ball up in the air and, just when you would expect to see it turn and fall back, it starts moving upward further and faster..."
Full article here...
posted by Useless Eaters at 6:00 PM
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