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The Mysterious ‘Dark’ Energy That Permeates the Universe Is Slowly Eroding
Physicists call the dark energy that drives the universe “the cosmological constant.” Now the largest map of the cosmos to date hints that this mysterious energy has been changing over billions of years.
In 1998, Riess’ group, along with another team of astronomers led by Saul Perlmutter, used the light of dozens of distant, dying stars called supernovas to illuminate the structure of the cosmos. To stop the dilution of matter from collapsing the universe, he imagined that all of space might be infused with a fixed amount of extra energy, represented by the symbol Λ, called lambda, and referred to as the cosmological constant. A stronger reason for enthusiasm is the fact that all three supernova catalogs—which span somewhat independent populations of supernovas—hint that dark energy is varying in the same way: Its power is waning, or as cosmologists say, “thawing.” “When we swap out all of these complementary data sets, they all tend to converge on this slightly negative number,” Brout said.
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