Model of ever-expanding universe confirmed by dark energy probe

The standard theory of cosmology—which says 95% of the universe is made up of an unknown energy we can’t see—has passed its strictest test yet. The first results released from an instrument designed to study the cosmic effects of this mysterious dark energy confirm that, to the nearest 1%, the universe has evolved over the past 11 billion years just as theorists have predicted. The findings, presented today in a series of talks at the American Physical Society meeting in Sacramento, California, and the Moriond meeting in Italy, as well as in a set of preprints posted to arXiv, come from the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI), which has logged more than 6 million galaxies in deep space to construct the largest 3D map of the universe yet compiled. “It’s a tremendous instrument and a major result,” says Eric Gawiser, a cosmologist at Rutgers University who was not involved with the work. “The universe DESI is finding is very sensible, with tantalizing hints of a more interesting one.” Cobbled together some 25 years ago to reconcile conflicting observations, the standard cosmological theory has proved remarkably resilient. Researchers in the late 1990s were expecting to find a universe slowing down from the constant pull of gravity from visible matter as well as unseen cold, dark matter (CDM). Instead, they found evidence that the expansion of the universe was accelerating. The simplest explanation for this “dark energy” wa...
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