Astronomers get a “more than a hint” that dark energy is not what they think

An international team of astronomers revealed on Wednesday the most residency evidence so far that the dark energy – a mysterious phenomenon that drives our world to expand faster – is not a continuous natural power but it recedes and flows during the cosmic time.

The new analogy suggests that the new energy may not resign from our world with a fate that is torn through each scale, from galaxy groups to atomic cores. Instead, its expansion may fade, leaving the universe in the end. Or the universe can reflect the path, in the end, condemned to a collapse that astronomers refer to in the name of the big crisis.

The latest results enhance a Hint Last April, there was something with the standard model of cosmology, the best theory of scientists in history and the structure of the universe. The measurements come from last year and this month, from cooperation that manages the dark energy spectral tool, or Desi, on a telescope at the Kitt Peak National Observatory in Arizona.

“It is more than just a hint,” said Michael Levy, the cosmologist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and Disi’s director. Dr. Levy added: “He puts us in conflict with other measurements.” “Unless dark energy – then, a boy, lines all the ducks, respectively.”

It was announced at a meeting of the American Physical Society in Nahaim, California, and the company A group of papers Description of the results, which are presented to review and publish peers in the material review magazine d.

“It is fair to say that this result, which has taken the nominal value, appears to be our biggest hint about the dark energy in the approximately 25 years since we discovered it,” which is the scientist of astronomical physics at Johns Hopkins University and the space telescope sciences in Baltimore who did not participate in the work but participated in the work. Nobel Prize 2011 in physics To discover dark energy, he wrote in an email.

But even when the notes challenge the standard of cosmology, which predicts that the dark energy is fixed over time, it has strengthened it with a separate result. On Tuesday, the multinational team that managed the cosmology telescope in a seizure in Chile Absolute The pictures were the most detailed ever of the infant world, when he was only 380,000 years old. (This telescope was stopped in 2022.)

they a reportIt does not seem that the standard model that the peer did not respond to, confirms that the standard model was working as expected in the early universe. One of the elements in this model, which is the constant of Hubble, describes the speed of the expansion of the universe, but over the past half of the century, fixed measurements did not coincide with starkly, and it is a contradiction today’s contraction to about nine percent. The theorists have hoped that an additional mutation of dark energy in the very early universe could be solved, when the conditions were very hot for the formation of atoms, solving this alleged tension.

It seems that the latest results of Atakama exclude this idea. But they do not say anything about whether the nature of the dark energy has evolved later at the time.

Both reports sparked a fatal praise of other cosmologists, who simultaneously confessed to a cosmic confusion about what all this means.

“I do not think that many good ideas of what might explain the tension at this stage,” said Windy Friedman, a universe at the University of Chicago, who died in measuring the universe and did not participate in any of the study.

“The good news is, no cracks in cosmic eggs. Bad news is, no cracks in cosmic eggs,” said Michael Turner, the scene at the University of Chicago, who also did not participate in the studies.

Dr. Turner, who formulated the term “dark energy”, added that if there is a rift, “it has not opened widely enough – so far – to see the next big thing in cosmology.”

Astronologists often compare galaxies in the world of expansion of raisins in the baking cake. With the height of the dough, the raisins are performed away. The more they are, the faster they are separated.

In 1998, two groups of astronomers measured the expansion of the universe by studying the brightness of A. A specific type of SupernovaOr the star of the explosion. Such Supernovas generates the same amount of light, so that it appears expected to be more expected distances. If the expansion of the universe slows down, as scientists believed at the time, the light should have been a little brighter than expected.

For them, the two groups found that Supernovas was dimose. Instead of slowing down, the expansion of the universe was already rushing.

No known energy for physicists can lead the accelerated expansion; Its strength should be abandoned because it spreads more thin across the balloon world. Unless that energy comes from the same space.

This dark energy endured all the air conditioning of the nonsense factor that Albert Einstein brought in his theory of gravity in 1917 to explain the reason for the collapse of the universe under its weight. The nonsense factor, known as the cosmic constant, represents a kind of cosmic dissonance that would balance gravity and prove the universe – or so I think. In 1929, when it became clear that the universe was expanding, Einstein abandoned the cosmic constant, and according to what he was described as the most wrong.

But it is too late. One of the features of the quantum theory that was developed in 1955 predicts that the empty space is the foam of energy that would produce a completely hateful force like Einstein’s dessert worker. For the last quarter of the century, this constant was part of the standard of cosmology. The model describes the universe born 13.8 billion years ago, in a huge spark known as the Big Bang, and it consists of 5 percent of atomic materials, 25 percent of dark energy and 70 percent of dark energy. But the model has failed to determine the already dark matter or dark energy.

If Dark Energy is really fixed for Einstein, then the standard model beats with a dark future: the universe will continue to speed, forever, and become darker. The distant galaxies will eventually be very far from seeing them. All energy, life and thought will be absorbed from the universe.

“Something follow”

Astrologists in DESI are trying to describe dark energy by wiping galaxies in different ages of cosmic time. Small violations have affected the spread of matter across the primitive universe over the distances between galaxies today – the distances that have expanded, in a measurable manner, along with the universe.

The data used for the last Desi measurement consists of A. Catalog Of approximately 15 million galaxies and other heavenly things. On its own, the data set does not indicate that anything blows with the theoretical understanding of dark energy. But in addition to other strategies to measure the expansion of the universe – for example, the study of explosive stars and the oldest light in the universe is emitting from one hundred thousand years after the big explosion – the data no longer lined up with what the standard model expects.

Enrique Pilas, post -PhD researcher at Arizona University, who announced the declaration of DESI publicly on Wednesday, indicated that the data indicate that the cosmic acceleration of the dark energy began early in time, which is currently weaker, which the standard model expects.

The contradiction between data and theory is more than 4.2 siga (in the uncertainty units preferred by physicists), one in every 50,000 chances is that the results are a coincidence. But the inconsistency is no longer yet five siga (equal to one out of every 3.5 million opportunities), the strict standard set by physicists to demand a discovery.

However, separation indicates that something in the cosmic model is not well understood. Scientists may need to review how to explain gravity or understand the old light from the big explosion. Astronomers who believe that the problem may be the nature of the dark energy.

“If we provide a dynamic dark energy, the puzzle cuts better to match each other,” said Mustafa Ehhak Bouchki, the cosmologist at the University of Texas at Dallas who helped lead in the latest analysis of Desi.

Will Perseval, cosmologist at the University of Waterloo at Ontario and the spokesperson for Disi Cooperation, has expressed the excitement of what lies on the horizon. “This is in reality a little shot in the arm of the field,” he said. “Now we have something to follow.”

In the fifties, astronomers claimed this There was only two numbers to explain cosmologyOne of the speed of the expansion of the universe and another describes its slowdown, or how much this expansion slowed. Things changed in the 1960s, with the discovery that the universe had bathed in light of the large explosion, known as the cosmic microwave background. This background radiation measured allowed scientists to investigate early universe physics and the way the galaxies formed and later developed. As a result, the standard model of cosmology now requires six parameters, including the density of normal and dark matter in the universe.

Since cosmology has become more accurate, additional tensions arose between the expected values ​​and measurement of these parameters, which leads to an abundance of theoretical extensions of the standard model. But the latest results from the cosmology telescope in Atacama – the maps so far to the cosmic microwave background – it seems to close the door on many of these extensions.

DESI will continue to collect data for at least another year. Other telescopes, on Earth and in space, draw their own views of the universe; Among them Zwicky facility In the European San Diego Space telescope Euclids And people It was recently launched SPHEREX. In the future, Vera C Robin Observatory A moving photo of the night sky will start from Chile this summer, and the Roman space telescope in NASA is scheduled to be launched in 2027.

Each will make light from the sky, measure the pieces of the universe from different views and contribute to a broader understanding of the universe as a whole. All of them serve as a constant reminder to a difficult egg of the universe to break.

“The universe is complicated. We are trying to separate a lot of different things. “