It has been more than twenty years since dark energy was discovered. Scientists have therefore had more than twenty years to decipher the secrets of this invisible substance that seems to be pulling the universe apart. Yet they still know virtually nothing about it. Dark energy may not even be a substance. It could be … Read more
Astronomers have used the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) and predicted an effect by Albert Einstein more than 100 years ago to discover that small galaxies packed a huge punch in the early cosmos, forming the entire universe when it was less than 1 billion years old. The international team found that the galaxies, which … Read more
A new analysis of how galaxy clusters have evolved over the 13.8 billion year history of the cosmos could help resolve a long-standing tension around the “lumpiness” of our universe’s matter content. In the future, it could also help scientists solve a host of other cosmic mysteries. The first data from the eROSITA all-sky survey … Read more
Plans for the successor to the most powerful particle accelerator in the world, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), are in full swing. The new atom smasher, called the Future Circular Collider (FCC), will dwarf the LHC in size and power. It will fuse particles with so much energy that scientists say it could be able … Read more
The universe could be younger than we think, based on the movements of satellite galaxies that reveal how recently they fell into a group of galaxies. According to measurements of the cosmic microwave background radiation (CMB) by the European Space Agency‘s Planck mission, the universe is about 13.8 billion years old. This calculation is based … Read more
A survey of more than 1,500 supernovae conducted by the Dark Energy Camera has placed strong constraints on the accelerating expansion of the universe. The results suggest that the mysterious force driving this cosmic acceleration, dark energy, can change over time and vary in density, challenging the standard model of cosmology. Related: Dark energy remains … Read more
A large discrepancy between different measurements of the expansion rate of our universe could be explained if our galaxy, the Milky Way, is located in a void of two billion light years. That is the conclusion of scientists who claim that a modified theory exists gravity can replace the standard model of cosmology. However, this … Read more
This article was originally published on The conversation. The publication contributed the article to Space.com Expert voices: opinion pieces and insights. Indranil Banik is a postdoctoral researcher in astrophysics at the University of St Andrews. One of the greatest mysteries in cosmology is the rate at which the universe is expanding. This can be predicted … Read more