Wielding state-of-the-art technologies and techniques, a team of Clemson University astrophysicists has added a novel approach to quantifying one of the most fundamental laws of the universe.
Astronomy
Nov 08, 2019
30
1473
A trio of researchers with the University of Manchester, Università di Roma 'La Sapienza' and Sorbonne Universities has sparked a major debate among cosmologists by claiming that data from the Planck space observatory suggests ...
As an astronomer, there is no better feeling than achieving "first light" with a new instrument or telescope. It is the culmination of years of preparations and construction of new hardware, which for the first time collects ...
Astronomy
Oct 29, 2019
33
232
A new instrument on the 4-m Mayall telescope has opened its array of thousands of fiber-optic "eyes" to the cosmos and successfully captured the light from distant galaxies. The milestone marks the beginning of final testing ...
Astronomy
Oct 28, 2019
6
63
A team of physicists and computer scientists at ETH Zurich has developed a new approach to the problem of dark matter and dark energy in the universe. Using machine learning tools, they programmed computers to teach themselves ...
General Physics
Sep 18, 2019
1
309
Scientists have discovered that a mysterious pressure dubbed "dark energy" makes up about 68% of the total energy content of the cosmos, but so far we don't know much more about it. Exploring the nature of dark energy is ...
Astronomy
Sep 13, 2019
4
239
Scientists have known for decades that the universe is expanding, but research in the past few years has shaken up calculations on the speed of growth—raising tricky questions about theories of the cosmos.
General Physics
Sep 13, 2019
66
286
Dark matter, by its very nature, is unseen. We cannot observe it with telescopes, and nor have particle physicists had any luck detecting it via experiments.
Astronomy
Sep 11, 2019
21
281
An experiment to test a popular theory of dark energy has found no evidence of new forces, placing strong constraints on related theories.
General Physics
Aug 19, 2019
28
1484
The European Space Agency's Euclid mission, set to launch in 2022, will investigate two of the biggest mysteries in modern astronomy: dark matter and dark energy. A team of NASA engineers recently delivered critical hardware ...
Astronomy
Jul 24, 2019
1
38
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.
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