Charlie Wood in Quanta:
Last spring, a team of nearly 1,000 cosmologists announced that dark energy — the enigmatic agent propelling the universe to swell in size at an ever-increasing rate — might be slackening. The bombshell result, based on the team’s observations of the motions of millions of galaxies combined with other data, was tentative and preliminary. Today, the scientists report(opens a new tab) that they have analyzed more than twice as much data as before and that it points more strongly to the same conclusion: Dark energy is losing steam.
“We are much more certain than last year that this is definitely a thing,” said Seshadri Nadathur(opens a new tab), a member of the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) collaboration, the group behind the new result.
Their finding, presented today at the Global Physics Summit in Anaheim, California, aligns with that of a second group of cosmologists, the 400-strong Dark Energy Survey (DES). Having also observed a huge swath of the cosmos, DES reported evidence(opens a new tab) of varying dark energy in a paper earlier this month and in a talk today at the Anaheim meeting.
More here.
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