What is Dark Energy?

Instead of pulling galaxies in our universe together, gravity seems to be driving them apart.<br /> How can gravity be repulsive, when our everyday experience shows it’s attractive?<br /> <br /> To explain it, we need dark energy.<br /> <br /> What goes up must come down… right?<br /> <br /> How do we think about something we can't see and don’t experience in our everyday lives, but seems to be pushing our universe apart ever faster?<br /> <br /> The nature of dark energy is one of the most important unsolved problems in all of science.<br /> But what, exactly, is dark energy, and why do we even believe that it exists?<br /> Step back a minute and consider a more familiar experience: what happens when you toss a ball<br /> straight up into the air?<br /> <br /> It gradually slows down as gravity tugs on it, finally stopping in mid-air<br /> and falling back to the ground. Of course, if you threw the ball hard enough (about 25,000 miles<br /> per hour) it would actually escape from the Earth entirely and shoot into space, never to return.<br /> <br /> But even in that case, gravity would continue to pull feebly on the ball, slowing its speed as it escaped the clutches of the Earth.<br /> <br /> But now imagine something completely different.<br /> Suppose that you tossed a ball into the air, and instead of being attracted back to the ground, the ball was repelled by the Earth and blasted faster and faster into the sky.<br /> <br /> This would be an astonishing event, but it’s exactly what astronomers have observed happening to the<br /> entire universe!<br /> Scientists have known for almost a century that the universe is expanding, with all of the galaxies<br /> flying apart from each other. And until recently, scientists believed that there were only two possible options for the universe in the future. It could expand forever (like the ball that you tossed upward at 25,000 miles an hour), but with the expansion slowing down as gravity<br /> pulled all of the galaxies toward each other.<br /> <br /> Or gravity might win out in the end and bring the expansion of the universe to a halt, finally collapsing it back down in a “big crunch,” just<br /> like your ball plunging back to the ground.<br /> <br /> This illustration shows abstracted ‘slices’ of space at different points in time as the universe expands.<br /> <br /> So imagine scientists’ surprise when two different teams of astronomers discovered, back in 1998, that neither of these behaviors was<br /> correct.<br /> <br /> These astronomers were measuring how fast the universe was expanding when it was much younger than today.<br /> <br /> But how could they do this without building a time machine?<br /> Luckily, a telescope is a time machine.<br /> <br /> When you look up at the stars at night, you aren’t seeing what they look like today – you’re seeing light<br /> that left the stars a long time ago – often many hundreds of years.<br /> <br /> By looking at distant supernovae, which are tremendously bright<br /> exploding stars, astronomers can look back hundreds of millions of years. They can then measure the expansion rate back then by<br /> comparing the distance to these far-off supernovae with the speed at which they are flying away from us.<br /> <br /> And by comparing how fast the universe was expanding hundreds of millions of years ago to its rate of expansion today, these astronomers discovered that the expansion is<br /> actually speeding up instead of slowing down as everyone had expected.<br /> <br /> What pushes galaxies like these in the Hubble deep field apart? <br /> Instead of pulling the galaxies in the universe together, gravity seems to be driving them apart.<br /> But how can gravity be repulsive, when our everyday experience shows that it’s attractive?<br /> <br /> Einstein’s theory of gravity in fact predicts that gravity can repel as well as attract, but only under very special circumstances.<br /> Repulsive gravity requires a new form of energy, dubbed “dark energy,” with very weird properties.<br /> Unlike ordinary matter, dark energy has negative pressure, and it’s this negative pressure that makes gravity repulsive. (For ordinary matter, gravity is always attractive).<br /> <br /> Dark energy appears to be smoothly smeared out through the entire universe, and it interacts with ordinary matter only through the action of gravity, making it nearly impossible to test in the laboratory.<br /> <br /> Scientists used to think that the expansion of the universe was described by the yellow,<br /> green, or blue curves. But surprise, it’s actually the red curve instead.<br /> <br /> The simplest form of dark energy goes by two different names: a cosmological constant or<br /> vacuum energy. Vacuum energy has another strange property. Imagine a box that expands as the universe expands. The amount of matter in<br /> the box stays the same as the box expands, but the volume of the box goes up, so the density of matter in the box goes down. In fact, the density of everything goes down as the universe expands.<br /> <br /> Except for vacuum energy – its density stays exactly the same. (Yes, that’s as bizarre as it sounds. It’s like stretching a string of taffy<br /> and discovering that it never gets any thinner).<br /> <br /> Astronomers continue to probe the skies, looking for finer details that can build on what we suspect about dark energy.<br /> Since dark energy can’t be isolated or probed in the laboratory, how can we hope to understand exactly what it’s made of?<br /> <br /> Different theories for dark energy predict small differences in the way<br /> that the expansion of the universe changes with time.<br /> <br /> Credit: www.earthsky.org<br /> <a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-AphUeU-TjZU/VYvNtvUgddI/AAAAAAAAAF4/DugTGNaLV3o/s2560/1435225523745.jpeg"><img border="0" src="https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-AphUeU-TjZU/VYvNtvUgddI/AAAAAAAAAF4/DugTGNaLV3o/s350/1435225523745.jpeg" style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" /></a>

What is Dark Energy?

Instead of pulling galaxies in our universe together, gravity seems to be driving them apart. How can gravity be repulsive, when our everyd...

Read more »

Weird Facts About Human Body

<div xmlns='http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml'>> Men lose about 40 hairs in a day and women lose 70 hairs in a day. <br/> <br/> > Your blood has same amount of salts in it as an ocean has.<br/> <br/> > You are taller in the morning than you are at night.<br/> <br/> > Heart circulates blood in your body about 1000 times each day.<br/> <br/> > Eyelashes last about 150 days.<br/> <br/> > There are 500 hairs in an eyebrow.<br/> <br/> > The average human body contains<br/> approximately 100 billion nerve cells.<br/> <br/> > It is not possible to sneeze with open eyes.<br/> <br/> > Bones are 4 times stronger than concrete.<br/> <br/> > Average life span of a taste bud is only 10 days.<br/> <br/> > You are born without knee caps and they don't appear until age of 2 to 6 years.<br/> <br/> > Children grow faster in springtime. <br/> <br/> > Eyes stay the same size throughout life but nose and ears never stop growing.<br/> <br/> > We born with 300 bones but end up with 206 bones when we are adult.<br/> <br/> > Human skull is made up of 26 different bones.<br/> <br/> > Hair is made of same substance as fingernails.<br/> <br/> > Our entire body functions stop when we sneeze, even your heart beat.<br/> <br/> > Tongue is the strongest muscle in human body.<br/> <br/> > Typical person goes to bathroom six times a day.<br/> <br/> > Food takes 7 seconds to reach stomach from mouth.<br/> <br/> > Children have more taste buds than adults.<br/> <br/> > Sneeze blows air out of nose at the speed of 100 miles per hour.<br/> <br/> > Largest muscle in your body is one on which you are sitting on.<br/> <br/> > Smallest bone of body is in ears.<br/> <br/> <a href='https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-NsSYwuLodyQ/VYffoKzMADI/AAAAAAAAAFk/3ikF8MO1U1U/s2560/1434967966575.jpeg' onblur='try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}'><img border="0" src="https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-NsSYwuLodyQ/VYffoKzMADI/AAAAAAAAAFk/3ikF8MO1U1U/s350/1434967966575.jpeg" style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;"/></a></div>

Weird Facts About Human Body

> Men lose about 40 hairs in a day and women lose 70 hairs in a day. > Your blood has same amount of salts in it as an ocean has. ...

Read more »