Dark Energy

NASA has officially named its next planet hunter. Previously known as the Wide Field Infrared Survey Telescope, the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope is named after NASA’s first chief astronomer, who has often been referred to as the Mother of Hubble.

Well over 100 new minor planets have been discovered in our solar system, in the darkness out beyond the orbit of Neptune. The discoveries were made by sifting through several years’ worth of data gathered by the Dark Energy Survey (DES).

The universe is believed to be expanding at an accelerating rate, thanks to a mysterious force dubbed dark energy. But how exactly does this force work?

Hypothetical “chameleon” particles could be behind dark energy, and physicists at CERN have been searching for these particles streaming from the Sun. Now, the team has reported the first results of their search.

The first images from the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) were snapped this week. DESI is designed to hunt for clues about dark energy by building a comprehensive 3D map of the sky. On April 1 DESI achieved “first light” with a mesmerizing image of the Whirlpool Galaxy.

An astrophysicist from Oxford has put forward a new theory that suggests that dark matter and dark energy are actually part of the same phenomenon: a “dark fluid” with negative mass that fills the universe.

Our universe seems to contain a suspiciously perfect amount of "dark energy" to sustain life. But new research suggests that life is still possible even with far more dark energy than we have, and the results have some big implications for the multiverse theory.

The first intriguing findings have been released from the Dark Energy Survey, a project studying the mysterious force that seems to be accelerating the expansion of the universe. The study has discovered 11 new stellar streams, the remains of other galaxies that our own Milky Way has torn to shreds.

The Lambda Cold Dark Matter model suggests that 68 percent of the universe is made up of dark energy. But a new study has questioned whether dark energy exists, citing simulations that found that accounting for the structure of the cosmos, the gap in the theory, which dark energy fills, vanishes.

Astronomers say they've made the most precise measurements to date of dark energy, while pinpointing the positions of 1.2 million galaxies in the largest ever 3D map of the universe. The map covers over a quarter of the sky, spanning a volume of 650 cubic billion light years.

​​New measurements carried out using the Hubble Space Telescope suggest that the Universe may be expanding up to 9 percent faster than previously believed.

The European Space Agency's (ESA) planned Euclid mission, which aims to study dark matter and dark energy, has reached a key pre-flight milestone. The endeavour has now passed its preliminary design review, allowing the team to actually start building the spacecraft.