- The Standard Cosmological Model Lambda-CDM (CDM) proposes that dark energy is a constant force in the universe.
- However, early hints from new detailed maps from the Dark Energy Spectroscopy Instrument suggest that dark energy is actually getting stronger and weaker over time.
- While this evidence isn’t enough to be considered a discovery, it does question some basic assumptions about how the universe formed and expanded.
Understanding the universe and our place in it is the great journey of human science, and the best current theories are…well… everything is a concept called Lambda-CDM (CDM) model. Since observable matter makes up only about 5% of the universe, the model represents dark energy () and cold dark matter (CDM), which together are believed to make up everything else. There’s just one problem: Dark matter and dark energy are invisible and interact weakly with gravity.
So, in other words, there are quite a few mysteries surrounding dark matter and dark energy. Now, new maps of the universe developed by the Dark Energy Spectroradiometer (DESI) are creating even more maps of the universe. DESI, located at Kitt Peak National Observatory in Tucson, Arizona, has just begun a five-year effort to create the most detailed map of the known universe, including 40 million galaxies spanning 11 billion years. The first data release, Recently released on the Internethas shown that cosmological models are pretty good, but cannot fully predict everything the instruments see.
“What we’ve seen so far is largely consistent with our best models of the universe, but we’ve also seen some potentially interesting differences that could indicate that dark energy is working,” said Michael Levi, DESI director and DOE scientist at Lawrence Berkeley. Evolve over time. These may or may not disappear with more data, so we’re excited to start analyzing our three-year data set soon.
These differences are for reference only to the cosmological constant, an idea first proposed by Albert Einstein in 1915, suggests that the universe is expanding at a constant rate. This is thought to be powered by the constant, unchanging work of dark energy, and leads astronomers to believe that eventually, the universe will expand indefinitely until every last atom is ripped apart. However, preliminary results from DESI contradict this idea. Instead, they show that dark energy appears to be getting stronger and weaker over time.
DESI collects this data by focusing on bubbles of baryon acoustic oscillations (BAO) that formed at the earliest moments of the universe’s explosion. Because when the universe formed, objects were hot and heavy (literally), and subatomic particles moved too fast for atoms to form. Therefore, the nuclei of hydrogen and helium atoms, known as baryons, are ubiquitous in their own right. These baryons form sound waves, which eventually freeze in place as the universe thins and cools.
Scientists use these BAOs as cosmic rulers, allowing them to measure the growth of the universe at different times in the past based on their distance. So far, this technique has found that the cosmological constant is not constant at all.
We do see, indeed, [see] Astrophysicists at Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory in Palanque-Delabrouille tell us hints that dark energy’s properties don’t correspond to simple cosmological constants New York Times.this is our first time[but] I wouldn’t call it evidence yet. It’s also too weak.
The new data comes at an important time for cosmology, the study of the foundations of everything, and it’s not the only competitor to cosmological models. This week, a meeting of the Royal Society in London will cast doubt on that standard view, with astronomers bringing evidence of an imbalance in the universe and groundbreaking (and puzzling) data from the James Webb Space Telescope. All of this is in preparation for major sky observations planned to come online in the next few years, including the Vera C. Rubin Observatory and the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope.
We are in a golden age of cosmology, with large-scale surveys underway and about to begin, and new technologies being developed to make the most of these data sets, said Arnaud de Mattia, co-leader of the DESI group that interprets cosmological data. de Mattia, said in a press statement. We’re all very interested to see if the new data can confirm the features we saw in the first-year sample and gain a better understanding of the dynamics of the universe.
After approximately 2,600 years of development, the great journey of universal human understanding is entering a new era.
Darren lives in Portland, has a cat, and writes/edits about science fiction and how our world works. If you look carefully, you can find his previous works on Gizmodo and Paste.
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