This idea allows space itself to have energy. And he also included a fudge factor in relativity called the cosmological constant, which he added - and later regretted - to keep the universe from collapsing inward. Einstein didn’t know about dark energy, but his equations suggested new space can come into existence. But they can describe its role in the universe, thanks to Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity. Now, that doesn’t mean researchers know what dark energy is. In fact, some prominent critics of dark matter still accept the existence of dark energy. “Amazement, because I just did not expect this result, and horror in knowing that it will likely be disbelieved by a majority of astronomers - who, like myself, are extremely skeptical of the unexpected.“īut rather than refute it, subsequent observations have only made the evidence for dark energy more robust. “My own reaction is somewhere between amazement and horror,“ astronomer Brian Schmidt, who led one of the two teams, told The New York Times in 1998. The universe wasn’t just expanding - the expansion was speeding up. Researchers studying supernovas in the the most distant galaxies discovered that distant galaxies were moving away from us faster than nearby galaxies. That notion was thrown out in the late 1990s, however, when two teams of astronomers spotted something that didn’t make any sense. Perhaps it would even someday collapse back in on itself in a Big Crunch. However, astronomers assumed that the combined gravitational pull of all the cosmos’ stars and galaxies should be slowing down the universe’s expansion. As a result, the evidence piled up for the Big Bang. Telescopic observations have shown that most galaxies are moving away from each other, which implies the galaxies were closer together in the distant past. We call this invisible mass dark matter.”Īstronomers have known that our universe is expanding for about a century now. “There has to be a lot of mass to make the stars orbit so rapidly, but we can’t see it. “Even stars at the periphery are orbiting at high velocities,” Rubin once explained in an interview with Discover. Rubin and Ford had found more evidence that some invisible form of matter is apparently holding the universe together. Instead, they noticed that the stars on a galaxy’s outskirts orbit just as fast - or faster - than the stars closer in. That’s the way planets in our solar system orbit. The stars at a galaxy’s outer edge should circle slower than stars near the center. He speculated that some kind of “dark matter” held them together.ĭecades later, astronomers Vera Rubin and Kent Ford found a similar phenomenon when they studied the rotation rates of individual galaxies. ![]() The galaxies moved so fast that they should simply fly apart. In the 1930s, Swiss-born astronomer Fritz Zwicky studied images of the roughly 1,000 galaxies that make up the Coma Cluster - and he spotted something funny about their behavior.
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