Mysterious, dark energy pervades the universe
Bullet Cluster of galaxies image courtesy of NASA Hubble.
More than 70% of our universe is made of dark energy.
There’s been great progress in cosmology – the study of the universe as a whole – over the last few years.
But this progress brings a new set of mysteries never before envisioned. That’s according to Martin Rees, a professor of cosmology and astrophysics at Cambridge University in England.
Martin Rees: We’ve learned about what the universe is made of, but that’s given us surprises. We’ve learned that it’s only 4% made up of ordinary atoms, about 25% is made of dark matter, which is completely unknown, but more than 70% is something even more mysterious – energy latent in space itself.
Scientists are calling this invisible energy dark energy, and Rees told us that it defies the current understanding of astrophysics.
Martin Rees: We won’t understand the dark energy until we’ve got a theory that tells us the nature of space at the very deepest level, because we believe that if we were to study space on a tiny, tiny scale, a scale far smaller than single atoms, we would find that it had a complicated, grainy structure.
Rees told us that when we can understand what’s happening at the level of the infinitesimal – we might learn why space itself has an energy associated with it – thought to be the dominant force in the universe.
Martin Rees also said, I think that there are two very different frontiers in the coming decade. One will be to understand the first tiny fraction of a second after the Big Bang to understand why the universe has expanded the way it is and to understand how our universe evolved from this hot, dense beginning, into the cosmos that we see around us, and of which we are part, the cosmos containing stars and galaxies.
Our thanks today to Research Corporation – a foundation for the advancement of science.
Our thanks to:
Martin Rees
Institute of Astronomy
Cambridge, UK
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