Dark Energy

Is dark energy hidden in the husks of burned-out stars? Astrophysics

Is dark energy hidden in the husks of burned-out stars?

The idea that the expansion of the universe is accelerating is taken as fact today. The cause is a repulsive form of energy, dark energy. But its nature remains a mystery. Now, a team of researchers at the University of Hawai’i in Mānoa have made an interesting prediction in The Astrophysical Journal: dark energy, which is responsible for this accelerated growth, could originate from a giant sea of compact objects spread out in the cavities between galaxies. Since the mid-1960s, physicists have known that the collapse of stars might not produce true black holes, but instead so-called “GEneric Objects…
Is the universe repelled by itself? Astrophysics

Is the universe repelled by itself?

Does the universe repel itself? That is roughly the idea that researchers from the Immanuel Kant Baltic Federal University in Kaliningrad, Russia proposed in a recent paper. Their paper refers to the Casimir effect, which involves a quantum-physics phenomenon that was predicted and also later confirmed by the Dutch scientist Hendrik Casimir. The Casimir effect causes two conductive plates arranged in parallel in a vacuum to be attracted to each other by a force. The idea that it might be responsible for previously unexplainable phenomena like dark energy is not completely novel. In general, it predicts that hard, fixed…
Dark energy changes over time Space

Dark energy changes over time

Dark energy is thought to be the reason why the universe continues to expand faster and faster, instead of contracting. Yet researchers still don’t have a well-founded theory on what exactly this mysterious form of energy is. If current theories of the universe are correct, dark energy must account for up to 72 percent of the total matter of the universe today. But what about in the past? Current theory assumes that dark energy had little influence early on. So, the expansion of the universe must have changed significantly over time. Now, with the help of NASA’s Chandra X-ray…