Dark energy may not actually exist, scientists claim [View All]

[steven johnson]

You know that mysterious force that's accelerating the expansion of the universe -- dark energy? There's a real possibility it doesn't exist.

The Standard Model of Cosmology, which describes the evolution of the Universe, begins with the Big Bang. Astronomers have recently observed that the galaxies are accelerating as they move away from each other, and cosmologists have sought to explain this unexpected acceleration by introducing the concept of dark energy, which permeates space, propels matter, and accounts for nearly 75 percent of the mass-energy in our Universe.
The new research, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, is likely to be equally controversial as the work it purports to challenge especially as it relies on our galaxy being at the centre of the Universe - a concept that has been generally disregarded in modern science.




Dark energy may not actually exist, scientists claim

We're saying there isn't any acceleration. The galaxies are displaced from where they're supposed to be because we're in the aftermath of a wave that put those galaxies in a slightly different position."
Ripples in a pond
Temple compared the wave to what happens when you throw a rock into a pond. In this case, the rock would be the Big Bang, and the concentric ripples that result are like a series of waves throughout the universe. Later on, when the first galaxies start to form, they are forming inside space-time that has already been displaced from where it would have been without the wave.
For the universe to appear to be accelerating at the same rate in all directions, we in the Milky Way would have to be near a local center, at the spot where an expansion wave was initiated early in the Big Bang when the universe was filled with radiation.
Temple concedes that this is a coincidence, but said it's possible that we are merely in the center of a smaller wave that affects the galaxies we can see from our vantage point - we need not be in the center of the entire universe for the idea to work.



'Big Wave' Theory Offers Alternative to Dark Energy

The work suggests that our home galaxy sits inside a vast region of space in which there's an unusually low density of matter due to a post-big bang wave that swept through the universe.
From our viewpoint, other galaxies outside this region appear to have moved farther away than expected, when really they're right where they should be.


Dark Energy's Demise? New Theory Doesn't Use the Force