Astronomers have known since about a century ago that the Universe is constantly expanding, due to the prestigious work of the American astronomer Edwin Hubble. Einstein was proven wrong, and the great scientist himself admitted that rooting for a static model of the Universe was one of his biggest blunders.
But the Universe seems to be expanding even faster than expected, and scientists struggled to understand why. According to a new article from nature.com, a new type of dark energy could shed some light on the mystery.
“Early dark energy” could uncover the secret
Two scientific studies have found a possible first trace of “early dark energy” that might have existed during the first 300,000 years after the Big Bang. Data was collected from 2013 to 2016 by the Atacama Cosmology Telescope (ACT) in Chile to find the possible trace.
Silvia Galli, who’s a cosmologist from the Paris Institute of Astrophysics, admitted one important thing, as quoted by Nature.com:
There are a number of reasons to be careful to take this as a discovery of new physics.
However, there’s no use opening the champagne just yet. There’s still no one hundred percent evidence that early dark energy was really there during the Early Universe. Colin Hill, who’s a co-author of the
ACT team’s paper, declared as cited by Nature.com:
If this really is true — if the early Universe really did feature early dark energy — then we should see a strong signal.
Dark energy, in general, is known as the mysterious driving force behind the acceleration of the Universe’s expansion. Scientists know very little about it, but they are always looking for answers.
The Universe began to expand even since the Big Bang, which was not exactly an explosion as many people believe. In fact, the Big Bang was more like the beginning of the expansion itself rather than a “bang”.
