Something in the universe is pushing everything away from everything else, and it's getting faster and faster. But scientists don't know what it is.
Something in the universe is pushing everything away from everything else, and it's getting faster and faster. But scientists don't know what it is.
Despite the leaps and bounds science has made over the course of the past centuries in increasing our understanding of the world around us, there’s still a lot we don’t know about how everything fits together.
Scientists believe that something called dark energy exists all around us, composing almost 70 per cent of the universe. But like its mysterious counterpart dark matter, which makes up the bulk of the remaining 30 per cent, they still haven’t actually found it.
By the early 1990s, scientists had made great progress in our scientific understanding of how our universe came to be, largely through the framework of the Big Bang Theory.
The theory, first proposed in the 1930s, said the universe started as a super-hot, super-condensed tiny point that quickly started to expand and cool.
Scientists believed gravity would eventually slow that expansion. But research conducted near the turn of the century showed this wasn't the case — in experiments for work that would eventually win the Nobel Prize, scientists Adam Riess, Saul Perlmutter and Brian Schmidt realised the expansion of the universe was not slowing.
Much to the contrary, in fact: The researchers found that the universe was not only continuing to expand — it was doing so in an accelerated way. This means that faraway galaxies are not only drifting away from us, but they’re doing it faster and faster as time passes. Scary, huh?
Further observations confirmed the scientists' findings, proving it wasn’t a fluke — the universe really is expanding at an ever-quicker rate. This knowledge came as a huge, puzzling revelation to scientists and represented a sort of paradigm shift.
Gravity, scientists conceded, was no longer the dominant force in the greater scales of the universe. Something else is lurking in there. Scientists started calling this mysterious accelerator "dark energy."
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