by New York (AP) – Scientists are in the nature of a mysterious force called Dark Energy, and nothing less than the fate of the universe hangs in balance.
The force is enormous – it makes up almost 70% of the universe. And it is powerful – it pushes all stars and galaxies away faster and faster.
And now scientists come a little closer to the understanding of how it behaves. The big question is whether this dark energy is a constant force that scientists have thought for a long time or whether the strength is growing up, a surprising wrinkle that was temporarily proposed last year.
The results presented at a meeting of the American Physical Society on Wednesday strengthens the case that the strength weakens, although scientists are not yet sure and they still have not found out what this means for the rest of their understanding of the universe.
The updated results come from an international research cooperation that creates a three -dimensional map to see how the galaxies have spread and teamed up over 11 billion years of the history of the universe. By careful persecution of the move of galaxies, scientists can get to know the powers that move them.
Cooperation as a Dark Energy Specroscopic Instrument was published last year its first analysis of 6 million galaxies and quasars and has now added more data, which increased the number to almost 15 million. Their updated results, which have been left with other measurements – exploding stars, the young universe and distortions in the galaxy form – support the idea presented last year so that dark energy waned.
“It moves from a really surprising finding at almost a moment when we have to throw out how we thought about cosmology and start from the front,” said Bhuvnesh Jain, cosmologist at the University of Pennsylvania, which was not involved in research.
It is not time to completely rule out the idea that the dark energy is constant because the new results are still shy, since the statistical proof physics of the gold standard is still shy. The cooperation aims to map around 50 million galaxies and quasare until the end of his survey in 2026. Other efforts around the world have an eye on the dark energy and aim to publish their own data in the coming years, including the Euclid Mission of the European Space Agency and Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile.
“We would like to see several different collaborations with similar measurements at this gold standard to ensure that the dark energy weakens, said cosmologist Kris Pardo from the University of Southern California, which was not involved in the new research.
When dark energy is constant, scientists say that our universe can continue to expand, and always colder, more lonely and still.
If Dark Energy ebbates over time that now appears plausible, the universe could one day stop expanding and then finally collapsing on itself in the so -called big crunch. It doesn’t seem to be the most happy fate, but it offers a certain conclusion, said the cosmologist and study employee Mustapha Ishak-Boushaki from the University of Texas in Dallas.
“Now there is the possibility that everything will end,” he said. “Would we look at a good or bad thing? I don’t know.”
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