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Rumours of a Strange Universe


paisley

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via Astronomy Picture of the Day

Eight years ago results were first presented indicating that most of the energy in our universe is not in stars or galaxies but is tied to space itself. In the language of cosmologists, a large cosmological constant is directly implied by new distant supernovae observations. Suggestions of a cosmological constant (lambda) are not new -- they have existed since the advent of modern relativistic cosmology. Such claims were not usually popular with astronomers, though, because lambda is so unlike known universe components, because lambda's value appeared limited by other observations, and because less-strange cosmologies without lambda had previously done well in explaining the data. What is noteworthy here is the seemingly direct and reliable method of the observations and the good reputations of the scientists conducting the investigations. Over the past eight years, independent teams of astronomers have continued to accumulate data that appears to confirm the unsettling result. The below picture of a supernova that occurred in 1994 on the outskirts of a spiral galaxy was taken by one of these collaborations.

sn94d_hiz_big.jpg

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There are few things as mind-blowing as trying to get your head around the numbers and proportions that the universe - ok, the galaxy, even - consists of. And that's without getting into the paradoxes of things like the event horizon, and the possibilities of energy. And what limits our physical brains have, and inferring what exists beyond those limits. There's real beauty in being humbled by all that.

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