Hubble Finds Evidence for Dark Energy in the Young Universe

NASAs Hubble Finds Evidence for Dark Energy in the Young Universe

Scientists using NASAs Hubble Space Telescope have discovered that dark energy is not a new constituent of space, but rather has been present for most of the universes history. Dark energy is a mysterious repulsive force that causes the universe to expand at an increasing rate.

Investigators used Hubble to find that dark energy was already boosting the expansion rate of the universe as long as nine billion years ago. This picture of dark energy is consistent with Albert Einsteins prediction of nearly a century ago that a repulsive form of gravity emanates from empty space.

So, thats the big cosmology news for today. Its very closely releated to whats discussed in the Beyond Einstein article of a couple of days ago.

Actually, in a way, its kind of boring, since the findings are pretty much what "conventional wisdom" (of the last 6 or 7 years) has expected. No apple carts have been upset as a result of this. But further confirmataion of accepted theories is in its own way very important too.

The take-away is that NASA now has even better justification for the JDEM kind of mission to obtain better supernovae data in order to put tighter limits on the w parameter in the "equation of state" for dark energy.

Ive written a lot about this stuff before in much more detail here, but perhaps Ill revisit that to highlight the most important ideas as they relate to the present news.

There are some presentation materials here from todays NASA press conference.

Tags: dark energy, cosmology

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Dark Matter Mystery Deepens

Dark Matter Mystery Deepens in Cosmic "Train Wreck"

This multi-wavelength image of Abell 520 shows the aftermath of a complicated collision of galaxy clusters, some of the most massive objects in the Universe. In this image, the hot gas as detected by Chandra is colored red. Optical data from the Canada-France-Hawaii and Subaru telescopes shows the starlight from the individual galaxies (yellow and orange). The location of most of the matter in the cluster (blue) was also found using these telescopes, by tracing the subtle light-bending effects on distant galaxies. This material is dominated by dark matter.

Abell 520 – click for 792×792 image

Additional information: here, here, here, here, here

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