#Dark#energy was assumed to be a #constant force in the universe, both currently and throughout cosmic history.
But new data suggest that it may be more changeable, growing stronger or weaker over time, reversing or even fading away.
“As #Biden would say, it’s a B.F.D.,” said #Adam#Riess, an astronomer at Johns Hopkins University and the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore.
Riess shared the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics with two other astronomers for the discovery of dark energy, but was not involved in this new study.
“It may be the first real clue we have gotten about the nature of dark energy in 25 years,” he said.
If the work of dark energy were constant over time, it would eventually push all the stars and galaxies so far apart that even atoms could be torn asunder, sapping the universe of all life, light, energy and thought.
Instead, it appears, dark energy is capable of changing course and pointing the cosmos toward a richer future.
Wendy Freedman, an astrophysicist at the University of Chicago who has led efforts to measure the expansion of the universe, praised the new survey as “superb data.”
The results, she said, “open the potential for a new window into understanding dark energy, the dominant component of the universe, which remains the biggest mystery in cosmology
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