Sharmila Kuthunur is a Seattle-based science journalist covering astronomy, astrophysics and space exploration. Follow her on X @skuthunur
Scientists have therefore had more than 20 years to decode the secrets of this invisible substance that appears to be pulling the universe apart. Yet, they still know close to nothing about it. Dark energy, in fact, may not even be a substance. It could be a force or even an intrinsic property of space itself.
"If this is true, this just turns cosmology upside down," said Dillon Brout of Boston University, who measures the acceleration of the universe with supernovas. Such a discovery would be a"paradigm shift in our thinking of what our best understanding of our universe is." Sign up for the Live Science daily newsletter nowGet the world’s most fascinating discoveries delivered straight to your inbox.
In addition to countless galaxies clustered together like knotted threads, DESI's new 3D map spotlights a faint pattern in the early universe known as Baryon Acoustic Oscillations, or BAO. These subtle, 3D wrinkles had flown through matter that existed during the first 380,000 years of our universe's history, freezing with time and turning into relics of an infant cosmos.
'If this is real, we're in uncharted territory'The preliminary conclusion that dark energy could be evolving with time comes from an early analysis of DESI data combined with data from other cosmological data. The researchers found a varying dark energy model agreed better with the data compared to the standard model.
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