News tagged with dark energy

Repulsive gravity as an alternative to dark energy (Part 2: In the quantum vacuum)

(PhysOrg.com) -- During the past few years, CERN physicist Dragan Hajdukovic has been investigating what he thinks may be a widely overlooked part of the cosmos: the quantum vacuum. He suggests that the quantum vacuum has ...

Physics / General Physics

created Feb 01, 2012 | popularity 4.7 / 5 (77) | comments 143 | with audio podcast report

Repulsive gravity as an alternative to dark energy (Part 1: In voids)

(PhysOrg.com) -- When scientists discovered in 1998 that the Universe is expanding at an accelerating rate, the possibility that dark energy could explain the observation was intriguing. But because there ...

Physics / General Physics

created Jan 31, 2012 | popularity 4.6 / 5 (49) | comments 125 | with audio podcast report

A second look at supernovae light: Universe's expansion may be understood without dark energy

(PhysOrg.com) -- The 2011 Nobel Prize in physics, awarded just a few weeks ago, went to research on the light from Type 1a supernovae, which shows that the universe is expanding at an accelerating rate. The ...

Space & Earth / Astronomy

created Oct 24, 2011 | popularity 4.8 / 5 (52) | comments 185 | with audio podcast feature

Antimatter gravity could explain Universe's expansion

(PhysOrg.com) -- In 1998, scientists discovered that the Universe is expanding at an accelerating rate. Currently, the most widely accepted explanation for this observation is the presence of an unidentified ...

Physics / General Physics

created Apr 13, 2011 | popularity 4.8 / 5 (44) | comments 266 | with audio podcast feature

Statistical modeling could help us understand cosmic acceleration

(PhysOrg.com) -- While it is generally accepted by scientists that the universe is expanding at an accelerated rate, there are questions about why this should be so. For years, scientists have been trying to determine the ...

Physics / General Physics

created Dec 24, 2010 | popularity 4.5 / 5 (28) | comments 153 | with audio podcast feature

Physicists propose mechanism that explains the origins of both dark matter and 'normal' matter

(PhysOrg.com) -- Through precise cosmological measurements, scientists know that about 4.6% of the energy of the Universe is made of baryonic matter (normal atoms), about 23% is made of dark matter, and the ...

Physics / General Physics

created Dec 10, 2010 | popularity 4.3 / 5 (52) | comments 70 | with audio podcast feature

Galactic nuclei offer some indication of axionlike particles

(PhysOrg.com) -- “Axionlike particles are interesting because they come up regularly when scientists study string theory. By looking at their properties, you hope to learn about string theory, or some other unified theory ...

Physics / General Physics

created May 28, 2009 | popularity 4.5 / 5 (26) | comments 18 feature

Can R2 gravity explain dark matter?

(PhysOrg.com) -- "In many ways, the standard model of cosmology works very well," Jose Cembranos tells PhysOrg. "However, there are very basic features that we just do not know. We have dark energy and dark matter. They d ...

Physics / General Physics

created Apr 20, 2009 | popularity 3.4 / 5 (81) | comments 50 feature

New Data Suggests We Don’t Live in a Void, and Supports Dark Energy

(PhysOrg.com) -- An alternative proposal to dark energy in which the Earth sits near the center of a large void is undergoing scrutiny, and the results show that void models fit poorly with observed data. ...

Physics / General Physics

created Jan 28, 2009 | popularity 3.9 / 5 (37) | comments 75 feature

When dark energy turned on (Update)

(PhysOrg.com) -- Some six billion light years distant, almost halfway from now back to the big bang, the universe was undergoing an elemental change. Held back until then by the mutual gravitational attraction ...

Space & Earth / Astronomy

created Mar 30, 2012 | popularity 4 / 5 (19) | comments 68 | with audio podcast

Swift narrows down origin of important supernova class

(PhysOrg.com) -- Studies using X-ray and ultraviolet observations from NASA's Swift satellite provide new insights into the elusive origins of an important class of exploding star called Type Ia supernovae. ...

Space & Earth / Astronomy

created Mar 20, 2012 | popularity 5 / 5 (3) | comments 0 | with audio podcast

Detection of cosmic effect may bring universe's formation into sharper focus

(PhysOrg.com) -- The first observation of a cosmic effect theorized 40 years ago could provide astronomers with a more precise tool for understanding the forces behind the universe's formation and growth, ...

Space & Earth / Astronomy

created Mar 20, 2012 | popularity 4.9 / 5 (16) | comments 12 | with audio podcast

Chandra finds largest galaxy cluster in early universe

(PhysOrg.com) -- An exceptional galaxy cluster, the largest seen in the distant universe, has been found using NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory and the National Science Foundation-funded Atacama Cosmology ...

Space & Earth / Astronomy

created Jan 10, 2012 | popularity 4.6 / 5 (9) | comments 12 | with audio podcast

Clearest picture yet of dark matter points the way to better understanding of dark energy

(PhysOrg.com) -- Two teams of physicists at the U.S. Department of Energy's Fermilab and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) have independently made the largest direct measurements of the ...

Physics / General Physics

created Jan 09, 2012 | popularity 4.9 / 5 (14) | comments 16 | with audio podcast

Closest Type Ia supernova in decades solves a cosmic mystery

Type Ia supernovae (SN Ia's) are the extraordinarily bright and remarkably similar "standard candles" astronomers use to measure cosmic growth, a technique that in 1998 led to the discovery of dark energy ...

Space & Earth / Astronomy

created Dec 14, 2011 | popularity 4.7 / 5 (32) | comments 177 | with audio podcast

Dark energy

In physical cosmology and astronomy, dark energy is a hypothetical form of energy that permeates all of space and tends to increase the rate of expansion of the universe. Dark energy is the most popular way to explain recent observations that the universe appears to be expanding at an accelerating rate. In the standard model of cosmology, dark energy currently accounts for 74% of the total mass-energy of the universe.

Two proposed forms for dark energy are the cosmological constant, a constant energy density filling space homogeneously, and scalar fields such as quintessence or moduli, dynamic quantities whose energy density can vary in time and space. Contributions from scalar fields that are constant in space are usually also included in the cosmological constant. The cosmological constant is physically equivalent to vacuum energy. Scalar fields which do change in space can be difficult to distinguish from a cosmological constant because the change may be extremely slow.

High-precision measurements of the expansion of the universe are required to understand how the expansion rate changes over time. In general relativity, the evolution of the expansion rate is parameterized by the cosmological equation of state. Measuring the equation of state of dark energy is one of the biggest efforts in observational cosmology today.

Adding the cosmological constant to cosmology's standard FLRW metric leads to the Lambda-CDM model, which has been referred to as the "standard model" of cosmology because of its precise agreement with observations. Dark energy has been used as a crucial ingredient in a recent attempt to formulate a cyclic model for the universe.

For more information about Dark energy, read the full article at Wikipedia.
This text uses material from Wikipedia and is available under the GNU Free Documentation License.