(ORDO NEWS) — Dark energy makes up 66.2% of the total mass of the universe.
In the 1990s, astronomers discovered that the expansion of the universe was gradually accelerating. This disproved the then ideas, according to which gravity should, on the contrary, gradually slow it down.
To explain this phenomenon, astrophysicists introduced the concept of dark energy, a hypothetical substance that has negative gravity – gravitational repulsion.
Often, dark energy is spoken of as a “tangible” real entity, although in reality, at the moment, it is only a mathematical abstraction.
American astronomers decided to clarify the approximate mass of this substance. “We have refined the main cosmological parameters by analyzing the outbreaks of more than 1,500 type 1 supernovae.
In many ways, our Pantheon+ project is the culmination of more than two decades of painstaking collaboration between theorists and experimenters to unravel the nature of the cosmos,” said Adam Riess of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore.
In general terms, the task of astronomers was to accurately measure the distance from the Milky Way to other galaxies and the speed of their movement – it is from these parameters that dark energy is largely derived, “pushing” them apart.
In total, astronomers and cosmologists have tracked the outbreaks of more than 1.5 thousand supernovae of the first type, and also studied in detail four dozen distant galaxies in which such explosions of stars occurred and where Cepheid variable stars are present.
Their periodic fluctuations in brightness have allowed cosmologists to accurately calculate the distance of these galaxies from the Milky Way.
As a result, scientists managed to double the accuracy of the values of cosmological parameters. The speed of removal of objects close to the Earth turned out to be 73.4 kilometers per second per megaparsec.
This value is considered abnormally high, and they are trying to find an explanation for it. The fraction of the mass of dark matter turned out to be 66.2%, and not 68%, as previously thought.
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