When any person hears the word, Physics, usually what first comes to mind is nature and its behaviors; well for me I usually imagine and think to myself of the universe as whole. The universe is everything, and having such a wide term makes us question so many things about life and the existence of what we can see and might never see. It wasn’t even 100 years ago when humanity thought the universe was static, everlasting and unchanging. It wasn’t until around 1927 when an astronomer by the name of Edwin Hubble proposed and confirmed that the universe is expanding. This is now known as the Hubble’s law which serves as an important piece of information for many physicist and astronomers today.
Now with this law being confirmed many questions arise in this modern era. What is the fate of the universe? Will we ever get to travel and discover more of this unknown? Will the universe someday stop expanding? These and many more are questions that physicist, astronomers, and even normal citizens ask themselves. Now what we do know is with the advances in technology every day that passes by we get closer to answering some, maybe smaller, questions. One of these is the realization of a phenomenon called “dark energy”. We don’t know what dark energy is yet, but we’re getting a better idea each day that passes by.
Dark energy is a phenomenon that was discovered in 1998 which could turn out to be the predominant force in the universe, instead of gravity. This is without a doubt one of the phenomenon’s that is being studied and explored the most by the scientific community during this era. The study of dark energy could lead to knowing more of how the universe began or how its future will be like. Many questions will always remain unanswered and new questions will always arise, but if we someday get to know if dark energy has always been this way or if it has changed over time. This can lead us to know if the future will be dark and empty because galaxies continue to move apart from each other at very fast rates, or if the rate of expansion of the universe will slow down.
All these questions and slightly possible answers may still be events billions to even trillions of years away, but we might at least get hints of it today. Any scientist would hope to see signs of what is to be of the future by looking and studying the behaviors of dark energy in the past and present. Dark energy is estimated to be around 75% of the mass-energy in the universe, it might depend on your source, with the other 25% being baryons, which is what atoms are made of (protons and neutrons), and dark matter. Now dark matter is another mysterious subject that has led to many questions of our universe.
Dark matter is a non-luminous matter that doesn’t absorb or radiate light, but acts normally under gravity. Now dark energy and dark matter are commonly confused for the same thing, but in reality they are probably complete opposites. The only thing common between both is that they’re invisible and we aren’t 100% sure what either of them are. Now unlike dark energy, which is almost a complete mystery to us, we do have some information on what dark matter is. In simple terms, dark matter is an invisible mass that holds galaxies together and without it galaxies and stars probably would not exist. It basically works like atoms and ordinary matter, in holding the universe together.
Now I say all this information because it leads to one important topic: the rate of expansion of the universe. I found research from BOSS, the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey, which is basically a survey designed for an optical telescope at the Apache Point Observatory in New Mexico, US. Baryon oscillations, sound waves in the universe, I learned are a way to measure the expansion rate of the cosmos (universe) and it can provide a more detailed look at dark energy. Now I found research that BOSS around 2 weeks ago revealed that they had mapped 164,000 galaxies estimated around 11 billion light-years away. This means that light left these galaxies when the Universe was more or less 3 billion years old.
These advances and studies of the cosmos are exactly what are needed to maybe have a better understanding of dark matter, dark energy, and our ever expanding universe. These results provide the most accurate measure humanity has had of the rate of expansion of the universe 11 billion years ago. This data is a possibility to answers on some of the most profound questions we have on the nature of dark energy and can lead to a more profound understanding of the universe. With the advances in technology every single day that passes by who knows if we are closer than ever before to understanding dark energy and dark matter, and to one of the biggest discoveries known to man.
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