![]() ![]() ![]() Precise studies like this one from BOSS give scientists more confidence in the odd idea of dark energy. You’d see your neighbors moving away from you, but you wouldn’t be able to see the air increasing inside the balloon.) As a result, physicists look for other ways to explain the strange behavior of our universe. (Imagine, for example, that you lived on the surface of an inflating balloon. They also show that Einstein’s cosmological constant describes that expansion.ĭark energy has been a difficult idea for scientists to accept because it’s been impossible to measure directly - scientists can only see its effects. BOSS’s measurements line up with previous measurements. These waves can be used as a kind of space ruler, telling scientists how far away the galaxies are from us - and how quickly the universe is expanding. The waves are like those that spread out from a pebble dropped into a pond. The BOSS project looks for energy waves that formed shortly after the Big Bang and continue today to race away from distant galaxies. Their new data pretty solidly suggest that dark energy - in the form of the cosmological constant - is speeding up the expansion of the universe. So far, they’ve measured distances to more than 250,000 galaxies. This “ dark energy” must be everywhere, and scientists are trying to figure out if it has the same properties as Einstein’s old cosmological constant.Īstronomers on a project called BOSS are now testing Einstein’s ideas. That discovery suggested the universe is filled with some mysterious force that acts against gravity and pushes everything away from everything else. Then, in 1998, scientists discovered that the universe’s growth is actually speeding up. ![]() Different colors represent different temperatures, with red areas warmer than blues. This is a picture of the energetic background of the universe - energy left over from the Big Bang. In fact, he called his creation of that cosmological constant his biggest blunder. When astronomers discovered in the 1920s that the universe was indeed getting larger, Einstein assumed that his correction factor was not needed. Einstein called this correction the “cosmological constant.” So to make his equations work, he included a kind of fudge factor that would act against gravity. They suggested gravity, a force that brings objects together, would cause the entire universe to shrink. Although he thought the size of the universe was not changing, his mathematical equations showed otherwise. In 1917, the famous German-born physicist - who studied energy, matter and the interaction between the two - wrote down his ideas about the shape and size of the universe. But a new study based on observations of distant galaxies suggests that the brilliant scientist was most likely correct. More than 80 years ago, Albert Einstein thought he’d made a big mistake. Scientists study the energetic echoes of the Big Bang to learn more about the size and shape of the universe. ![]()
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