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astronomer-desi-dark-energy.html

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[19HS-DARKE]

'More Than a Hint' That Dark Energy Isn't What Astronomers Thought

New data further challenge the best scientific theory of the history
and the structure of the universe. But a separate recent result
reinforces it.

Using the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument, or DESI, scientists
have assembled the largest three-dimensional map of the universe to
date. Earth is at the center in this animation.

'More Than a Hint' That Dark Energy Isn't What Astronomers Thought

New data further challenge the best scientific theory of the history
and the structure of the universe. But a separate recent result
reinforces it.

Using the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument, or DESI, scientists
have assembled the largest three-dimensional map of the universe to
date. Earth is at the center in this animation.Credit...

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Katrina MillerDennis Overbye

By Katrina Miller and Dennis Overbye

Katrina Miller reported from Anaheim, Calif. Dennis Overbye reported
from New York City because, he noted, the universe was not respecting
his retirement.

  * March 19, 2025

Leer en espanol

An international team of astronomers on Wednesday unveiled the most
compelling evidence to date that dark energy -- a mysterious
phenomenon pushing our universe to expand ever faster -- is not a
constant force of nature but one that ebbs and flows through cosmic
time.

Dark energy, the new measurement suggests, may not resign our
universe to a fate of being ripped apart across every scale, from
galaxy clusters down to atomic nuclei. Instead, its expansion could
wane, eventually leaving the universe stable. Or the cosmos could
even reverse course, eventually doomed to a collapse that astronomers
refer to as the Big Crunch.

The latest results bolster a tantalizing hint from last April that
something was awry with the standard model of cosmology, scientists'
best theory of the history and the structure of the universe. The
measurements, from last year and this month, come from a
collaboration running the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument, or
DESI, on a telescope at Kitt Peak National Observatory in Arizona.

"It's a bit more than a hint now," said Michael Levi, a cosmologist
at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the director of DESI.
"It puts us in conflict with other measurements," Dr. Levi added.
"Unless dark energy evolves -- then, boy, all the ducks line up in a
row."

The announcement was made at a meeting of the American Physical
Society in Anaheim, Calif., and accompanied by a set of papers
describing the results, which are being submitted for peer review and
publication in the journal Physical Review D.

"It's fair to say that this result, taken at face value, appears to
be the biggest hint we have about the nature of dark energy in the
~25 years since we discovered it," Adam Riess, an astrophysicist at
Johns Hopkins University and the Space Telescope Science Institute in
Baltimore who was not involved in the work but shared the 2011 Nobel
Prize in Physics for discovering dark energy, wrote in an email.

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