The universe is still expanding at an accelerating rate, but it may have slowed down recently compared to a few billion years ago, early results from the most precise measurement of its evolution yet suggested Thursday.
The universe is still expanding at an accelerating rate, but it may have slowed down recently compared to a few billion years ago, early results from the most precise measurement of its evolution yet suggested Thursday.
While the preliminary findings are far from confirmed, if they hold up it would further deepen the mystery of dark energy—and likely mean there is something important missing in our understanding of the cosmos.
These signals of our universe’s changing speeds were spotted by the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI), which is perched atop a telescope at the Kitt Peak National Observatory in the US state of Arizona.
Each of the instrument’s 5,000 fiber-optic robots can observe a galaxy for 20 minutes, allowing astronomers to chart what they have called the largest-ever 3D map of the universe.
« We measured the position of the galaxies in space but also in time, because the further away they are, the more we go back in time to a younger and younger universe, » Arnaud de Mattia, a co-leader of the DESI data interpretation team, told AFP.
Just one year into its five-year survey, DESI has already drawn up a map which includes six million galaxies and quasars using light that stretches up to 11 billion years into the universe’s past.
The results were announced at conferences in the United States and Switzerland on Thursday, ahead of a series of scientific papers being published in the Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics.
