The mystery of dark energy has finally been SOLVED – as scientists come up with a radical new theory to explain the mysterious force
Dark energy, one of the most mysterious concepts in astronomy, has baffled the world’s greatest minds for decades.
Dark energy is a temporary term that scientists use to refer to anything that causes the universe to expand faster over time.
But we don’t know exactly what dark energy is – and no one has ever seen or measured it directly.
But now scientists from the University of Canterbury, New Zealand, say they have finally solved the puzzle with a radical new theory.
In a shocking new article, they say dark energy isn’t real after all.
Instead, new evidence supports the ‘timescape’ model of cosmic expansion, which has no need for dark energy.
This ‘timescape model’ takes into account the fact that time itself moves much more slowly in the presence of a gravitational field, such as that around the Earth.
Lead author Professor David Wiltshire said: ‘Our findings show that we don’t need dark energy to explain why the universe appears to be expanding ever faster.’
Scientists claim to have solved the mystery of dark energy by showing why we don’t need this strange force to explain the expansion of the universe. These findings were based on observations of supernovae in galaxies such as NGC 5643 (photo)
This research comes at a time of growing uncertainty surrounding the current ‘standard model’ of the universe.
Scientists have generally assumed that the universe is made up of ordinary matter, but also of “dark matter” (a type of material that is not visible or observable) and a constant outward force called dark energy.
It is generally believed that dark energy is a weak anti-gravitational force that acts independently of matter and makes up about two-thirds of the mass-energy density of the universe.
This theory works well to explain the cosmic microwave background radiation left behind by the Big Bang and the distribution of galaxies in the universe.
However, in 1998, the Hubble Space Telescope measured the distances between distant galaxies and found that the universe is currently expanding much faster than theory should predict.
This problem has emerged again as new measurements by the James Webb Space Telescope have confirmed that the gaps between galaxies are growing eight to twelve percent faster than expected.
In their new article, published in Monthly notices of the Royal Astronomical Society LettersProfessor Wiltshire and his colleagues have reassessed the light from distant ‘supernovas’ – stars that have exploded at the end of their lives.
According to the Standard Model of cosmology, the universe contains matter, dark matter, and a weak anti-gravitational force called dark energy. These together explain how the cosmos evolved from the Big Bang to what we see today
While dark matter is a type of matter that cannot be observed or seen, dark energy is a type of energy that does not interact with matter in a normal way. Scientists have proposed that these two things could make up as much as 96 percent of the universe. Pictured: NASA’s map of dark matter in the universe
Observations from the Hubble Space Telescope (photo) show that the universe is expanding faster than the standard model would predict. This does not fit with the idea that dark energy leads to steady expansion. Pictured is a cluster of galaxies as seen by the Hubble Space Telescope
They chose to look at a type of supernova called “type Ia” supernovas, which are caused by dying white dwarfs (which are what stars become after they exhaust their nuclear fuel).
Because the brightness we see is a product of the distance between the light and the observer, scientists can measure the brightness of a Type Ia supernova to find out how far away it is.
By comparing that data to the speed at which the object is moving away from Earth, scientists can calculate how much the universe has expanded since the supernova occurred.
By looking at this data, the researchers tried to see which of the models of the universe would best explain what they found.
What they found was that the alternative timescape theory not only fit the data, but actually produced better predictions about how the supernovae should appear.
Professor Wiltshire said: ‘The research provides compelling evidence that could resolve some of the key questions surrounding the peculiarities of our expanding cosmos.
“With new data, the universe’s greatest mystery could be solved by the end of this decade.”
This theory eliminates the need for dark matter by challenging one of the basic assumptions of traditional cosmology.
Scientists claim that time moves faster in the gaps between stars. Even with steady expansion, these voids will grow faster than the populated areas of the cosmos, creating the illusion that the universe is accelerating. Pictured: The Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument map of the universe
The researchers found that their ‘timescape’ model was better at predicting the data for a type of supernova in galaxies like NGC 1015 (pictured). This suggests that we don’t need dark energy to explain why the universe is expanding at the current rate
It may be baffling to us humans, but variations in gravitational forces change the way time progresses in the universe.
The timescape model suggests that a clock on Earth would move 35 percent slower than one thrown into cosmic voids between superclusters of galaxies.
By the time the clock here on Earth completes one round of 24 hours from midnight to midnight, the clock in space would already read 8 a.m. the next day.
On the time scale of the universe, this means that billions of years more have passed in the voids between galaxies than in the heart of the Milky Way.
So even if the universe expanded at the same rate as after the Big Bang, the spaces between galaxies would have become much larger than we would expect, creating the illusion of acceleration.
Professor Wiltshire added: ‘We now have so much data that in the 21st century we can finally answer the question: how and why does complexity yield a simple average expansion law?’
The authors say that science will soon be able to prove this model is correct.
The European Space Agency’s Euclid satellite, launched in July 203, has the power to distinguish between the uniform expansion of the Friedman equation and the timescale alternative.
While this will require at least a thousand high-quality supernova observations, it puts scientists within striking distance of solving one of the universe’s greatest mysteries.
WHAT IS DARK ENERGY?
Dark energy is a phrase used by physicists to describe a mysterious ‘something’ that causes unusual things to happen in the universe.
The universe is full of matter and the pull of gravity pulls all matter together.
Then came 1998 and the Hubble Space Telescope observations of very distant supernovae that showed that long ago the universe was actually expanding more slowly than it is today.
The universe is not only expanding, but expanding faster and faster as time goes by,” Dr. Kathy Romer, scientist at the Dark Energy Survey, told MailOnline, as illustrated in this NASA image.
So the expansion of the universe has not slowed down due to gravity, as everyone thought, but has accelerated.
No one expected this, no one knew how to explain it. But something caused it.
‘The universe is not only expanding, but it is expanding faster and faster as time goes on,’ Dr Kathy Romer, scientist at the Dark Energy Survey, told MailOnline.
“What we would expect is that the expansion will become slower and slower as time goes on, because it has been almost 14 billion years since the Big Bang.”