The growth of the Universe confirms Einstein’s theory of relativity – DW – 11/21/2024

A study conducted using data from the Dark Energy Electroscopic Instrument (DESI).in which the Institute of Astrophysics of the Canary Islands (IAC) participatesin the Spanish Atlantic Archipelago, confirmed that in the last 11 billion years of the universe’s existence, gravity behaves as predicted by Albert Einstein’s 1915 theory of general relativity.

Einstein’s theory connected space, time and gravity. He argues that concentrations of mass and energy bend the structure of spacetime, affecting the movement of anything that passes nearby.

This analysis led to the most accurate measurements of cosmic-scale gravity to date, as announced this Wednesday (21 November 2024) by the IAC.

The most generally accepted model of the Universe

Their new study confirms the most widely accepted model of the universe and limits possible modified theories of gravity that have been proposed as alternative ways to explain unexpected observations, including the accelerating expansion of the universe often attributed to dark energy.

“General relativity has been very well tested on the scale of planetary systems, but we also needed to prove that our hypothesis works on much larger scales,” explains Pauline Zarrouk, a cosmologist at the French National Center for Scientific Research, working at the Laboratory of Nuclear Physics and high energies and who led the new analysis.

“Studying the rate of galaxy formation allows us to directly test our theories, and for now we agree on what general relativity predicts on cosmological scales,” he adds.

The most accurate measurement

The comprehensive analysis used nearly six million galaxies and quasars and allowed researchers to “see” back 11 billion years.

With just one year of data, DESI has made the most precise global measurement of the growth of structures in the Universe, surpassing all previous efforts that took decades to complete.

The results presented now represent an expanded analysis of the first year of data from DESI, which in April created the largest 3D map of the Universe to date, and revealed hints that dark energy may evolve over time.

The new work, called Full Form Analysis, expands the ability to extract more information from data by measuring how galaxies and matter are distributed in space at different scales.

“This is the first time DESI has analyzed the growth of a cosmic structure. We show an exciting new ability to explore modified gravity and improve the constraints of dark energy models. And this is just the tip of the iceberg,” says Dragan Huterer. from the University of Michigan and co-lead of the DESI team that interprets cosmological data.

More about DESI

DESI is a new generation instrument that can simultaneously capture light from 5,000 objects. It was built and operated with funding from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science.

It is mounted on the US National Science Foundation’s Nicholas Mayall 4-meter telescope at Kitt Peak National Observatory.

The experiment is now in its fourth of five years of sky exploration, and plans to collect about 40 million galaxies and quasars by the end of the project.

The collaboration is analyzing the first three years of data collected and hopes to provide updated measurements of dark energy and the expansion history of the Universe in the spring of 2025.

uh (efe, Reuters)