Dark energy tagged posts

New research confirms the role Type Ia supernovae, like G299 pictured above, play in measuring universe expansion. Courtesy ofNASAdownload

New research by cosmologists at the University of Chicago and Wayne State University confirms the accuracy of Type Ia supernovae in measuring the pace at which the universe expands. The findings support a widely held theory that the expansion of the universe is accelerating and such acceleration is attributable to a mysterious force known as dark energy. The findings counter recent headlines that Type Ia supernova cannot be relied upon to measure the expansion of the universe.

Using light from an exploding star as bright as entire galaxies to determine cosmic distances led to the 2011 Nobel Prize in physics...

The universe may not be expanding at an accelerating rate, as previously thought, but rather, at a constant rate, suggests new research. (Stock image) Credit: © watoson / Fotolia

5 years ago, the Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to 3 astronomers for their discovery, in 1990s, that the universe is expanding at an accelerating pace. Their conclusions were based on analysis of Type Ia supernovae – the spectacular thermonuclear explosion of dying stars – picked up by the Hubble and large ground-based telescopes. It led to the widespread acceptance of the idea that the universe is dominated by ‘dark energy’ that drives this accelerating expansion.

Now, a team led by Prof Subir Sarkar of Oxford University’s Dept of Physics has cast doubt on this standard cosmological concept...

This simulation of the large-scale structure of the universe reveals the cosmic web of galaxies and the vast, empty regions known as voids. Credit: Image by Nico Hamaus, Universitäts-Sternwarte München, courtesy of The Ohio State University

A lot of information contained in cosmic voids, study suggests. An international team of astronomers reports that they were able to achieve 4X better precision in measurements of how the universe’s visible matter is clustered together by studying the empty spaces in between. Researchers looking for new ways to probe gravity and dark energy adopted a new strategy: looking at what’s not there.

Paul Sutter, Ohio State University, said that the new measurements can help bring astronomers closer to testing Einstein’s general theory of relativity, which des...

The Sloan Digital Sky Survey and its Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey has transformed a two-dimensional image of the sky (left panel) into a three-dimensional map spanning distances of billions of light years, shown here from two perspectives (middle and right panels). This map includes 120,000 galaxies over 10% of the survey area. The brighter regions correspond to the regions of the Universe with more galaxies and therefore more dark matter. Credit: Jeremy Tinker and SDSS-III

A team of hundreds of physicists and astronomers constructed a 3D map to make one of the most precise measurements yet of the dark energy currently driving the accelerated expansion of the Universe. “We have spent 5 years collecting measurements of 1...