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is one of those cosmological features that we are still learning about. While we can't see it directly, we can most famously observe its effects on the Universe - primarily how it is causing the expansion of the Universe to speed up.
But recently, physicists have begun to question even that narrative, pointing to results that show the expansion isn't happening at the rate our math would predict. In essence, dark energy might be changing over time, and that would have a huge impact on the Universe's expansion and cosmological physics in general. A new paper from Dr. Slava Turyshev, who is also famously the most vocal advocate of the Solar Gravitational Lens mission, explores an alternative possibility that our data is actually just messy from inaccuracies in how we measure particular cosmological features - like supernovae. The debate stems from the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument releasing its second batch of data, known as DR2 in astronomy jargon.. One potential explanation for that mismatch is that dark energy is"evolving" - either getting stronger or weaker over the course of billions of years. Not so fast, says Dr. Turyshev. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and there's one very clear potential error that could explain the disconnect between DESI DR2 and the CMB.Supernovae are commonly used for distance measurements at cosmological scales, so getting their brightness exactly right is critical to accurately measuring distance. And Dr. Turyshev, like many other astrophysicists, isn't sure our current crop of telescopes is up to that task. Another potential point of error is the"cosmic ruler" used in these scenarios. Known as the"sound horizon" , it measures the distance a clump of matter would move from its starting point out into the Universe, but at a very specific speed - the speed of sound in the hot plasma that made up the early Universe. These waves, known as Baryon Acoustic Oscillations, lasted for about 380,000 years before coming to a halt when the Universe cooled down enough for the first atoms to form, essentially freezing them in place. We use that distance as a ruler to measure distances to other things spread throughout the Universe. But, since it is again a measurement, slight errors in the instruments used to calculate that measurement can introduce further errors down the line. To rectify this, Dr. Turyshev suggests a mathematical trick called the Alcock-Paczynski diagnostic. Instead of using the sound horizon, this technique uses a calculated shape of the Universe that isn't reliant on fuzzy measurements of a certain point in the Universe's early history. If dark energy still seems to be fluctuating even after those checks are made, Dr. Turyshev has some potential answers as to why. He came up with a new one, called the Late-Transition Interacting Thawer model, which models how dark energy could"thaw" after a certain amount of time after the universe started and is slowly beginning to interact with dark energy more and more, which is what we see as the expansion of the universe. Another potential explanation is known as the"Phantom Crossing", where dark energy might become extremely powerful at some point, transitioning to what is called"phantom" energy. But if this theory is true, according to Dr. Turyshev, we will need a whole new set of physics to explain it, as it doesn't fit the Ultimately, we're still collecting more evidence on dark energy and all its associated mysteries. Luckily, even more data is coming, and some is already here. Euclid, another cosmological probe, recently released its first data set, and astrophysicists are already poring over it in the hopes of shining some more light on this dark force in the universe.There's still plenty more discoveries left to come in this space, as DESI is also actively collecting data for its third data release, which will contain data from the first three years of the main survey, hopefully later this year.
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