The docu-series launched with a huge two-hour premiere on April 26th that explored NASA’s New Horizons mission to Pluto, the Hubble Telescope, and a handful of current and future NASA missions.
The series will air every Tuesday, with hour-long episodes that dissect some of the major questions in the universe. The first episode takes a crack at some of the most fundamental beliefs in modern physics, and also takes aim at some of science’s most essential names — like Albert Einstein.
The newest episode, “Hunt for Dark Energy,” chronicles the unknown and extremely powerful energy that’s causing the universe to rapidly expand. The spookily named “dark energy” supposedly makes up 70 percent of the universe, and its very existence calls into question Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, so much so that some physicists think that Einstein’s pillar of physics might need to be amended or scrapped altogether.
It seems old Einstein wasn’t aware of the force that’s increasingly pushing the universe apart.
Dark energy has been around forever, but it was first discovered in 1998 when scientists were measuring the brightness of exploding stars, or supernovas. Since then dark energy has produced more questions than answers, and with a number of experiments from scientific teams from around the world taking place to try and factor in dark energy into physics, there might be a new undiscovered Einstein waiting to propose another theory of relativity.