This Chart Offers A View Of The History Of The Universe. The Cosmos began to expand with the Big Bang, but about 10 billion years later, it strangely began to accelerate thanks to a theoretical phenomenon called dark energy. -NASA
Dec. 26 () –
One of the biggest mysteries in science, dark energy, doesn’t actually exist, according to researchers searching solve the enigma of how the Universe is expanding.
For the past 100 years, physicists have generally assumed that the cosmos is growing equally in all directions. They used the concept of dark energy as a placeholder to explain unknown physics they couldn’t understand, but the controversial theory has always had its problems.
Now, a team of physicists and astronomers at the University of Canterbury, New Zealand, is challenging the status quo, using improved analysis of supernova light curves to show that The Universe is expanding in a more varied and “more irregular” way.
New evidence supports the cosmic expansion model of the “temporary landscape”, which doesn’t need dark energy because differences in light stretching are not the result of an accelerating Universe, but a consequence of how we calibrate time and distance.
Take into account that gravity slows down time, so an ideal clock in empty space ticks faster than inside a galaxy.
The model suggests that a clock in the Milky Way would be about 35 percent slower than the same in an average position in large cosmic voidsmeaning they would have spent billions more years in the voids. This, in turn, would allow for greater expansion of space, making it appear that the expansion accelerates as those vast voids grow to dominate the Universe.
Professor David Wiltshire, who led the study, said in a statement: “Our findings show that we don’t need dark energy to explain why the Universe appears to be expanding at an accelerated rate.
“Dark energy is a misidentification of variations in the kinetic energy of expansion, that is not uniform in a Universe as unequal as the one in which we really live”.
He added: “The research provides compelling evidence that may resolve some of the key questions surrounding the peculiarities of our expanding cosmos. With new data, the biggest mystery of the Universe could be solved by the end of this decade.”
The new analysis has been published in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society Letters.
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