‘Another mind-blowing change’: New data suggests mysterious dark energy is evolving
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New hints from one of the most extensive surveys of the cosmos to date suggest that mysterious dark energy may be evolving in ways that could shift how astronomers understand the universe.
Dark energy is a term scientists use to describe an energy or force that accelerates the expansion of the universe. But — although it represents 70% of the energy in the cosmos — researchers still have no idea exactly what dark energy is, said Mustapha Ishak-Boushaki, professor of physics and astrophysics at the University of Texas at Dallas.
Ishak-Boushaki is a cochair of a working group for the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument collaboration, known as DESI. The instrument, now in its fourth year of surveying the sky, can observe light from 5,000 galaxies at the same time. When the project concludes next year, it will have measured the light of about 50 million galaxies.
The collaboration, which includes more than 900 researchers, shared the latest data release from DESI’s first three years of observations on March 19. Among its findings are the measurements of nearly 15 million galaxies and quasars, some of the brightest objects in the universe. Ishak-Boushak helped lead the analysis of the latest DESI data release, which suggests that dark energy — long called a “cosmological constant” given that astronomers thought it was unchanging — is behaving in unexpected ways and may even be weakening over time.
