Dark energy: mysterious cosmic force seemingly weakening: scientists

London: Scientists now say that ‘dark energy’, the force that powers the expansion of the universe, is weakening, The Guardian reported citing a survey.

The finding, according to the report, could have ‘profound implications’ for the current understanding of the universe based on the cosmic expansion stemming from dark energy, discovered in the late 1990s.

The survey by a team at the Kitt Peak National Observatory in Arizona using the dark energy spectroscopic instrument (Desi) could lead to “the possibility that its current expansion could eventually go into reverse in a ‘big crunch’”.

Meanwhile, the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) helps conducting spectrographic astronomical surveys of distant galaxies.

The widely held theoretical model of the universe, an understanding evolved decades ago, could have substantial change from the suggestion that dark energy reached a peak billions of years ago.

Prof Alexie Leauthaud-Harnett, who is a co-spokesperson for Desi and a cosmologist at the University of California, Santa Cruz, reportedly said that the development is deeply intriguing, adding ‘It is exciting to think that we may be on the cusp of a major discovery about dark energy and the fundamental nature of our universe’.

Astronomers in the 1990s discovered dark energy when they used distant supernova explosion to probe how ‘the rate of cosmic expansion has changed over time’.

It led to the expectation that gravity would counteract the expansion happening since the big bag.

But instead, scientists discovered by investigating supernovas that the rate of expansion of the universe was ‘accelerating’ powered by an unknown force that scientists called dark energy.

Scientists believed that dark energy is constant, which means the universe will eventually end in a ‘big freeze’ with everything drifting far apart that ‘even light cannot bridge the gap between galaxies’.

However the finding announced on Thursday challenges this view.