Dark energy ‘doesn’t exist’ so can’t be pushing ‘lumpy’ universe apart, physicists say

Ye Olde Universe
[image credit: Hubble / Wikipedia]

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Always the most likely reason nobody can find any, despite spending vast sums searching.
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One of the biggest mysteries in science—dark energy—doesn’t actually exist, according to researchers looking to solve the riddle of how the universe is expanding, says the Royal Astronomical Society (via Phys.org).

Their analysis has been published in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society Letters.

For the past 100 years, physicists have generally assumed that the cosmos is growing equally in all directions. They employed the concept of dark energy as a placeholder to explain unknown physics they couldn’t understand, but the contentious theory has always had its problems.

Now a team of physicists and astronomers at the university of Canterbury in Christchurch, New Zealand are challenging the status quo, using improved analysis of supernovae light curves to show that the universe is expanding in a more varied, “lumpier” way.

The new evidence supports the “timescape” model of cosmic expansion, which doesn’t have a need for dark energy because the differences in stretching light aren’t the result of an accelerating universe but instead a consequence of how we calibrate time and distance.

It takes into account that gravity slows time, so an ideal clock in empty space ticks faster than inside a galaxy.

The model suggests that a clock in the Milky Way would be about 35 percent slower than the same one at an average position in large cosmic voids, meaning billions more years would have passed in voids. This would in turn allow more expansion of space, making it seem like the expansion is getting faster when such vast empty voids grow to dominate the universe.

Professor David Wiltshire, who led the study, said, “Our findings show that we do not need dark energy to explain why the universe appears to expand at an accelerating rate.

“Dark energy is a misidentification of variations in the kinetic energy of expansion, which is not uniform in a universe as lumpy as the one we actually live in.”

He added, “The research provides compelling evidence that may resolve some of the key questions around the quirks of our expanding cosmos.

“With new data, the universe’s biggest mystery could be settled by the end of the decade.”

Full article here.
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Image: Ye Olde Universe [credit: Hubble / Wikipedia]