Colliding protogalaxies less than 1 billion years after the Big Bang. Credit: Illustration by Adolf Schalle. Hubble Gallery (NASA). Wikipedia Commons.
Before the Hubble Space Telescope (HST), it was thought that the universe was slowing in its expansion and might someday fold back in on itself. In 1998, the HST revealed that rather than slowing, the rate of universal expansion is actually picking up.
We still don’t know why.One explanation is dark energy. Rather than allowing the universe to expand at a constant rate, dark energy pushes it along, causing it to pick up speed. Astronomers can only detect it indirectly, by measuring the distance between galaxies, for instance.
Dark energy is thought to comprise roughly 68% of the known universe, and dark matter 27%. Yet, we only know about them in terms of gravity. In other words, scientists can only detect them indirectly, by how they cause stars and galaxies to move and behave. For instance, the amount of matter inherent in galaxy clusters alone doesn’t account for the gravity that keeps them together. Some other force must be involved. Here, dark matter is the most common answer.
Astrophysicists have been postulating the existence of dark matter for about a century. Swiss astronomer Fritz Swicky was the first to see that there was far more matter in the universe than we could directly observe. Though he postulated this in 1933, US astronomer Vera Rubin made the concept more popular in the 1970s, when he used it to try and illustrate how stars move and at what velocity.
Australian and U.S. astrophysicists won the Nobel Prize in physics in 2011, for their 1998 discovery of the Hubble Constant.
This is the rate at which the universe expands. Since then, despite many attempts to detect dark matter and dark energy, no progress has been made.
The Big Bang and the accelerated expansion of the universe. Credit: Coldcreation. Wikipedia Commons.
Now, André Maeder, honorary professor in the Department of Astronomy at the University of Geneva (UNIGE), has a radical theory that’s shaking up astrophysics. He says neither dark…
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