The 2020s could see a rapid expansion in dark energy research.
For starters, two powerful new instruments will scan the night sky for distant galaxies. The Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument, or DESI, will measure the distances to about 35 million cosmic objects, and the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope, or LSST, will capture high-resolution videos of nearly 40 billion galaxies.
Both projects will probe how dark energy—the phenomenon that scientists think is causing the universe to expand at an accelerating rate—has shaped the structure of the universe over time.
But scientists use more than telescopes to search for clues about the nature of dark energy. Increasingly, dark energy research is taking place not only at mountaintop observatories with panoramic views but also in the chilly, humming rooms that house state-of-the-art supercomputers.
The central question in dark energy research is whether it exists as a cosmological constant—a repulsive force that counteracts gravity, as Albert Einstein suggested a century ago—or if there are factors influencing the acceleration rate that scientists can’t see. Alternatively, Einstein’s theory of gravity could be wrong.
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