🚀 go-pugleaf

Jupiter wrote:
> 
> Science breakthrough of the year: proof of our exploding universe
> http://www.guardian.co.uk/spacedocumentary/story/0,2763,1110244,00.html
> 
> Tim Radford, science editor
> Friday December 19, 2003
> The Guardian
> 
> Welcome to the dark side. Around 73% of the universe is made
> not of matter or radiation but of a mysterious force called dark
> energy, a kind of gravity in reverse. Dark energy is listed as the
> breakthrough of the year in the US journal Science today.
> 
> The discovery - in fact a systematic confirmation of a puzzling
> observation first made five years ago - paints an even more
> puzzling picture of an already mysterious universe. Around
> 200bn galaxies, each containing 200bn stars, are detectable by
> telescopes. But these add up to only 4% of the whole cosmos.
> 
> Now, on the evidence of a recent space-based probe and a
> meticulous survey of a million galaxies, astronomers have filled
> in at least some of the picture.
> 
> Around 23% of the universe is made up of another substance,
> called "dark matter". Nobody knows what this undetected stuff
> could be, but it massively outweighs all the atoms in all the
> stars in all the galaxies across the whole detectable range of
> space. The remaining 73% is the new discovery: dark energy.
> This bizarre force seems to be pushing the universe apart at an
> accelerating rate, when gravitational pull should be making it
> slow down or contract.
> 
> "The implications for these discoveries about the universe are
> truly stunning," said Don Kennedy, the editor of Science.
> "Cosmologists have been trying for years to confirm the
> hypothesis of a dark universe."
> 
> Sir Martin Rees, Britain's astronomer royal, called it a "discovery
> of the first magnitude".
> 
> The findings were made by an orbiting observatory called the
> Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP). This measured
> tiny fluctuations in the cosmic microwave background, in effect
> the dying echoes of the Big Bang that launched time, space and
> matter in a tiny universal fireball.
> 
> These painstaking measurements were then backed up by the
> telescopes of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, which mapped a
> million galaxies to see how they clumped together or spread
> out. Both confirmed that dark energy must exist.
> 
> The findings settle a number of arguments about the universe,
> its age, its expansion rate, and its composition, all at once.
> Thanks to the two studies, astronomers now believe the age of
> the universe is 13.7bn years, plus or minus a few hundred
> thousand. And its rate of expansion is a bewildering 71km per
> second per megaparsec. One megaparsec is an astronomical
> measure, totting up to 3.26m light years. Something latent in
> space itself is acting as a form of antigravity, exerting a push on
> the universe, rather than a pull.
> 
> Dark matter was proposed more than 20 years ago when it
> became clear that all the galaxies behaved as if they were far
> more massive than they seemed to be. All sorts of explanations
> - black holes, brown dwarfs and undetectable particles that are
> very different from atoms - have been suggested. None has been
> confirmed.
> 
> But dark matter exists, all the same. The dark energy story
> began in 1998 when astronomers reported that the most distant
> galaxies seemed to be receding far faster than calculations
> predicted. A study of a certain kind of supernova confirmed that
> they had not been misled: the universe was indeed expanding
> ever faster, rather than decelerating.
> 
> The discovery that some unexpected and undetectable force
> was pushing the fabric of space apart seemed to confirm a
> famous observation decades ago by the British scientist JBS
> Haldane: "The universe is not only queerer than we suppose. It
> is queerer than we can suppose." It once again raised profound
> questions about the nature of the universe: about space, and
> time, and energy, and matter. And it set the theorists on the
> hunt first for an explanation, and then for an experiment that
> would confirm their hypothesis.
> 
> So they turned once again to the original evidence for the Big
> Bang, the cosmic microwave background radiation. This is the
> original blaze of creation, cooled to minus 270 C - just about 3 C
> above absolute zero. Several lines of research, including
> experiments in the Antarctic and from high-flying balloons,
> began to provide a clearer picture: the universe simply had to
> consist of something more than just atoms and so-called dark
> matter.
> 
> "But WMAP, with superbly precise data beamed back from a
> little spacecraft a million miles away, has made the evidence
> more precise," said Sir Martin, of the Institute of Astronomy at
> Cambridge.
> 
> "The dark energy is spread uniformly through the universe, latent
> in empty space. Its nature is a mystery. Whereas there's a real
> chance of learning what the dark matter is within the next five to
> 10 years, I'd hold out less hope of understanding the dark
> energy unless or until there's a unified theory that takes us
> closer to the 'bedrock' of space and time."
> 
> http://www.guardian.co.uk/spacedocumentary/story/0,2763,1110244,00.html
I dunno; we could be in a global Truman Show. All we have to go on is
what it *looks* like, and a lotta stuff we see dont make a lotta sense.
Maybe there is some kind of 'crystal sphere' out there from which the
energy we perceive is emitted.


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