"So dark energy is even more mysterious than dark matter, because dark energy is something that's completely uniform, fills up the universe and, unlike gravity, it seems to repel matter and it's intrinsically repulsive in the sense that it causes the universe not to come together, but to accelerate," he said.
"We've found the universe seems to be accelerating, and this acceleration is due to a sort of anti-gravity, in effect, which we call dark energy."
But he says scientist do not know if the acceleration will come to an end.
"One hypothesis is that the expansion, the acceleration will continue forever and the universe will never be able to re-collapse, it'll just... all galaxies will move farther and farther apart," he said.
"Right now we can see many billions of galaxies when we look around the sky with the biggest telescopes. As the universe accelerates they will drift away from us, they'll become invisible.
"Some day there'll be only our own galaxy and nothing else and after that, very little at all in the visible universe."
Professor Joe Silk, Oxford University
No comments:
Post a Comment