NASA will host a media teleconference with Hubble Space Telescope astronomers today to announce the discovery that dark energy has been an ever-present constituent of space for most of the universe’s history.
In the mean time, we can discuss what our universe looks like with the dark energy and the dark matter.
In the most precise picture of our universe, astronomers have determined that a meager five percent of its mass comes from the ordinary matter that makes up planets, stars and gases.
Our universe is a very strange cosmic cocktail. The 95 percent of the universe that’s not matter like around us instead it is matter that can’t be seen at all. This matter still mystifies astronomers and cosmologists. The 95 percent of the universe’s mass that’s not ordinary matter is a bubble of inquisitive ingredients, all of it dubbed “dark” because astronomers can’t yet see it.
33 percent is cold dark matter,a class of slow-moving matter that can be detected at this point only by the presence of its mysterious gravitational pull.
Remaining 62 percent of the universe is in fact an even more mystifying type of matter known as dark energy. Like the dark matter, dark energy can’t be seen or touched and is known only by its gravitational pull, but unlike dark matter that is thought to appear randomly throughout the universe, dark energy is believed to be uniformly distributed and is also thought to be responsible for our universe’s accelerating growth.
The first confirmation of dark energy came only a few years ago and the research is still in progress as to know what exactly is the dark energy and where will this lead us in the process of exploring the universe. The latest work by NASA will probably put forward strongly that dark energy actually exists.
Via: cosmicvariance
