Latest Dark energy Stories
University of Texas astronomers use Lonestar supercomputer to explore role of dark matter in galaxy formation From Earth, observers use telescopes to look and learn about the distant luminous spheres. But the telescope often isn't the only instrument used. Karl Gebhardt, professor of astrophysics at The University of Texas at Austin and one of the principal investigators for the Hobby-Eberly Telescope Dark Energy Experiment (HETDEX) project, makes revolutionary discoveries about dark...
Charles L. Bennett and the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) team are the recipients of the 2012 Gruber Cosmology Prize. Their observations and analyses of ancient light have provided the unprecedentedly rigorous measurements of the age, content, geometry, and origin of the universe that now comprise the Standard Cosmological Model. The Prize citation further recognizes that the exquisite specificity of these results has helped transform cosmology itself from “appealing...
Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com United Kingdom scientists have been given a $13 million grant by the U.K. Space Agency to build the Euclid satellite to study the "dark Universe." Physicists and engineers have been working on getting the Euclid mission up into space by the end of this decade to study the enigmatic dark matter and dark energy. The additional investment by the U.K. Space Agency will help get the Euclid project to its end goal. The Euclid Consortium is made up of nearly...
The exploding stars known as Type Ia supernovae serve an important role in measuring the universe, and were used to discover the existence of dark energy. They're bright enough to see across large distances, and similar enough to act as a "standard candle" - an object of known luminosity. The 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded for the discovery of the accelerating universe using Type Ia supernovae. However, an embarrassing fact is that astronomers still don't know what star systems make...
New information obtained by scientists using a 10-meter telescope located in Antarctica has strengthened the most widely accepted explanation for the mysterious force that is behind the increasingly rapid expansion of the universe, according to a pair of press releases published this week. According to a statement from the National Science Foundation (NSF), the most recent South Pole Telescope (SPT) data "strongly" supports Albert Einstein's cosmological constant, said to be the leading...
Berkeley Lab scientists are leaders of BOSS, the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey- They and their colleagues in the third Sloan Digital Sky Survey have announced the most precise measurements ever made of the era when dark energy turned on Some six billion light years ago, almost halfway from now back to the big bang, the universe was undergoing an elemental change. Held back until then by the mutual gravitational attraction of all the matter it contained, the universe had been...
The Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS-III) announced the most accurate measurements yet of the distances to galaxies in the faraway universe, giving an unprecedented look at the time when the universe first began to expand at an ever-increasing rate. Scientists from the University of Portsmouth and the Max-Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics will present the new results in a press conference at 10:00 BST on Friday, March 30th at the National Astronomy Meeting in Manchester. The...
AUSTIN, Texas, Jan. 25, 2012 /PRNewswire/ -- Independent Media Productions, Inc., an Austin video production company, has been honored with a Telly Award. "Dark Energy: Speeding Up the Universe" is one video in a series of astronomy-related videos produced by Independent Media Productions for the University of Texas at Austin's Texas Cosmology Center. The Telly Award is the premier award honoring outstanding video and film productions. Dark Energy is a complex theory to explain,...
Berkeley Lab scientists and their Sloan Digital Sky Survey colleagues use galactic brightness to build a precision model of the cosmos Since 2000, the three Sloan Digital Sky Surveys (SDSS I, II, III) have surveyed well over a quarter of the night sky and produced the biggest color map of the universe in three dimensions ever. Now scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and their SDSS colleagues, working with DOE’s National...
WASHINGTON, Jan. 11, 2012 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has looked deep into the distant universe and detected the feeble glow of a star that exploded more than 9 billion years ago. The sighting is the first finding of an ambitious survey that will help astronomers place better constraints on the nature of dark energy, the mysterious repulsive force that is causing the universe to fly apart ever faster. (Logo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20081007/38461LOGO)...
Latest Dark energy Reference Libraries
Image Caption: The Hubble Extreme Deep Field (XDF) was completed in September 2012 and shows the farthest galaxies ever photographed by humans. Each speck of light in the photo is an individual galaxy, some of them as old as 13.2 billion years; the observable universe is estimated to contain more than 200 billion galaxies. Credit: NASA/Wikipedia What is Cosmology? I once commented to an acquaintance that I was fascinated by the field of Cosmology, and mused that if I had more time, I...
Quintessence (Dark Energy) -- Quintessence or dark energy is a hypothetical form of energy postulated to exist in order to explain observations of an accelerating universe. This energy would act like a vacuum pressure, pushing things apart. Other attempts to explain these recent observations involve a non-zero cosmological constant, which has the same effect. Indeed, sometimes quintessence is said to result in a non-zero cosmological constant, and conversely a non-zero cosmological...
Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) -- The Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) was launched on June 30, 2001 at 3:46 p.m. EDT at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Florida, USA. The goal of WMAP was to map out minute differences in the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) radiation which would help test theories of the nature of the universe. On February 11, 2003, the public relations group from NASA made a press release regarding the age and composition of the universe....
