Epic Discovery: New Galaxy Observations Proves Dark Energy Dominates the Universe
New results from NASA's Galaxy Evolution Explorer and the Anglo-Australian Telescope atop Siding Spring Mountain in Australia confirm that dark energy is a smooth, uniform force that now dominates over the effects of gravity . The observations follow from careful measurements of the separations between pairs of galaxies.
Using the Anglo-Australian Telescope, 26 astronomers (from 14 different institutions) contributed to the ‘WiggleZ Dark Energy Survey', which mapped the distribution of galaxies over an unprecedented volume of the Universe.
Because light takes so long to reach Earth, it was the equivalent of looking seven billion years back in time – more than half way back to the Big Bang.
“This is the first individual galaxy survey to span such a long stretch of cosmic time,” said Michael Drinkwater from the School of Mathematics and Physics (SMP) at The University of Queensland (UQ).
The survey, which covered more than 200,000 galaxies, took four years to complete and aimed to measure the properties of ‘dark energy' - a concept first cast by Einstein in his Theory of General Relativity.
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