NASA Explains One of the Universe’s Greatest Mysteries

At the beginning of time there was practically nothing…except in the vastness of the observable Universe, where all of its matter and radiation is compressed into an incredibly dense and hot mass only a few millimeters in diameter.

Yes it sounds incomprehensible. That’s why Stephen Hawking, The brilliant British physicist, cosmologist and writer noted that nothing that might have existed before the beginning of the universe as we know it has anything to do with what happened after… and that there is no theory that can explain it .

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For Hawking during his The origin of the Universe was a singularity, a moment when all laws of physics cease to apply. And about 13.8 billion years ago, space began to experience the rapid expansion we know as “Big Bang”, a unique cosmic cataclysm.

After this initial expansion, which lasted only a fraction of a second (one trillionth of a second), gravity began to slow down the Universe. But space won’t stay like this because 9 billion years After the Big Bang, its expansion began to accelerate, driven by an unknown force that scientists called dark energy.

History of discovery

The atoms that make up everything known make up only 5% of the cosmos. The remaining 95% is what scientists call dark energy. (almost 70%), and 25% is the so-called dark matter. Both have the adjective “dark” because we can’t see them.

In 1912 thanks to the independent work of American astronomers Henrietta Swan Leavitt and Vesto Slifer, It was possible to observe the speed at which the galaxies were moving away from us. These observations laid the foundation for many future scientific advances: 1922, Russian scientist and mathematician Alexander Friedman based on Albert Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity published in 1917, suggested that the Universe is expanding.

IN 1927, Belgian astronomer Georges Lemaitre independently, and also taking into account Einstein’s general theory of relativity, came to the conclusion that The Universe is expanding, despite the fact that Einstein argued in his theory that the Universe is static.

In 1929, the astronomer Edwin Hubble confirmed: using astronomer data Milton Humason that the universe is really expandingin what is today known as Hubble’s law or the Hubble-Lemaître law.

In 1998, two different teams of astronomers Those who observed distant supernovae realized that they were moving away much faster than expected. This could only indicate that The Universe itself should expand faster over time. This work was awarded Nobel Prize in Physics 2011.

Now the only thing left to discover What caused the Universe to expand faster? while.

So…what is dark energy?

Short answer: We do not know. dark energy is this is just the name that astronomers have given to the mysterious “something” that is causing the Universe to expand at an accelerating rate. Dark energy was not discovered until the late 1990s.

dark energy This is one of the greatest mysteries of the Universe.. For decades, scientists have developed theories about our expanding universe. Now for the first time we have powerful enough tools to test these theories and really explore the big question: “What is dark energy?”

ESA Euclid Mission (European Space Agency), launched in 2023, will create a 3D map of the universe to observe how matter has been torn apart by dark energy over time. This map will include observations of billions of galaxies located up to 10 billion light years from Earth.

NASA Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescopescheduled for release in May 2027, is designed to explore dark energy and will also create a super-high-resolution 3D map of dark matter. Vera K. Rubin Observatory, It is currently under construction in Chile and is scheduled to open in 2025. It is also intended to support our growing understanding of dark energy.

Dark energy is not the same as dark matter

Dark matter is matter that does not interact with the electromagnetic field. therefore we cannot see it, and it is not absorbed or reflected by materials. We know it exists only because, as with dark energy, astrophysics and cosmology have provided many clues to its existence.

Dark matter is another material component in Einstein’s equations., and is the dominant component of the cosmos: there is about five times more of it than ordinary matter (atoms). Forks capable of counteracting the expansion of the Universe only up to a certain point.

“Our understanding of reality is far from complete. Reality exists independently of us.” Andrey Linde, Stanford University.

Finally though dark energy is not the same as dark mattersimilar in one characteristic: We don’t know what they really are.