The Dark Energy And Dark Matter

The Dark Energy And Dark Matter :

Ever since 1929 when Edwin Hubble discovered that all the galaxies, stars and planets are not fixed in place but are in the process of moving away from each other, scientists have known that the universe was in fact expanding. From this they had calculated backwards and found that at one time everything must have been squashed together into an infinitesimally tiny point in space from where it blasted explosively outwards after the Big Bang, 13.7 billion years ago.

The prevailing belief all along had also been that because of the gravitational pull of the sum total of matter contained in the universe, this outward expansion was bound to slow down gradually and ultimately stop. After that everything would inevitably start falling back inwards once again towards the original point in what was termed the Big Crunch.

But in the 1990s, when better and more accurate instruments had been developed and some scientists looked at exploding stars called supernovae located in really remote galaxies, they discovered that far from slowing down as theorists had predicted, the universe’s expansion was actually accelerating. Besides landing the concerned researchers a shared Nobel Prize, the discovery led them to the conclusion that some unknown process was causing the universe to speed up. They named it dark energy.

Today, we know that dark energy makes up about 70 per cent of all energy in the universe and that combined with another entity known as dark matter constitutes 96 per cent of everything there is.

Om Namah Shivay.