This video was produced for the Texas Cosmology Center, which is a joint center of the departments of astronomy and physics. It introduces the subject of dark energy, which has been one of the great mysteries in the field of astromomy since the 1990s, when it was discovered that the universe was expanding faster as it ages, and it was calculated that this energy constitutes about 70 percent of all the matter and energy in the universe.
So far, though, scientists don’t know what dark energy is. It could spring from the vacuum of space itself, becoming a more dominant force as the universe expands and gets more spacious. Dark energy could be exotic new particles or other undiscovered physics. Dark energy could mean that our understanding of gravity needs an overhaul. Or it could be something completely different — perhaps something that no one has even thought about. It could require scientists to revise their ideas about the Big Bang, or even develop an entirely new scenario to explain how the universe was born.
For more on this topic, and other big questions of the cosmos, visit the website of HETDEX, the Hobby-Eberly Telescope Dark Energy Experiment.
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