An Important Force of the Universe Appears to Be Changing, Scientists Find

[Judi Lynn]

"It sounds like it will be a paradigm shift, something that will change our understanding and the way we are putting all the pieces together."

Mar 23, 10:30 AM EDT by Frank Landymore


Dark energy, the mysterious force that makes up 70 percent of everything in existence, was hypothesized to explain why the expansion of the universe was accelerating. Ever since, it's been thought of as a constant, immutable presence.

Now, the latest observations from the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) indicate that dark energy has actually changed over time — a development that could potentially upend the prevailing cosmological model, and perhaps hint at a new understanding of physics. The findings, detailed in a series of papers currently awaiting peer review, have implications not only for how the universe has evolved, but what its eventual fate might be as well.

"It sounds like it will be a paradigm shift, something that will change our understanding and the way we are putting all the pieces together," Mustapha Ishak-Boushaki, a cosmologist at the University of Texas and DESI team member, told Quanta Magazine of the findings.

The DESI telescope, located in Kitt Peak, Arizona, searches and measures galaxies to tease out the effects of dark energy. It's now surveyed a staggering 15 million of these realms as far as 11 billion light years away, providing the most comprehensive portrait to date of the galaxies as they shifted and clustered together over the eons — movements thought to betray the presence of dark energy.

Following up on preliminary findings shared a year ago, the latest DESI results strongly suggest that the acceleration of the universe's expansion started sooner than once thought, peaked early on, and is currently weakening.

This is a big deal. Dark energy, as it's currently theorized, stems from the idea of a cosmological constant. Proposed by Albert Einstein, it assumes that there's some unseen background force powerful enough to explain why the universe, with all its mass, doesn't collapse under its own gravity.

More:
https://futurism.com/force-universe-changing

[cachukis]

1. Is it a pulse or the end of expansion.

I always wondered about defining the energy of the ball as it came to a halt hitting the wall and then heading away. Can that moment be defined?