What Does Dark Energy Mean for the Fate of the Universe? | Discover Magazine
Yet Riess results told another story. Bizarrely, the supernovae appeared to be farther away from Earth than anybody had anticipated, implying that the cosmos was altogether bigger than astronomers had bargained for, as though gravity s pulling power was somehow being overwhelmed.
The best explanation was seemingly nonsensical: The universe s expansion must be speeding up. Schmidt immediately deemed that conclusion absurd. No one had ever observed a force capable of driving acceleration like this; he dismissed the finding as a mistake.
As the months passed, however, the disturbing notion persisted. What s more, an independent team, led by Saul Perlmutter at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, California, had arrived at the same result. In 2011, Schmidt, Riess and Perlmutter shared the Nobel Prize in Physics for groundbreaking measurements revealing that the expansion of the universe is accelerating. Yet, despite having more than a decade to mull over the result, cosmologists are still struggling to understand how this could be happening.
Putting a name to the root of their frustration, physicists somewhat whimsically chalked the speed up to an unknown dark energy that mysteriously pushes space apart, combatting gravity s inward pull. If dark energy were to drive a galloping kind of expansion, the universe itself might one day be torn apart in a Big Rip. The deep mystery enshrouding this anti-gravity effect is perhaps the biggest puzzle of modern physics, with little consensus over where dark energy comes from, how it works, or if it exists at all.
Strange.