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'The models were right': Astronomers find 'missing' matter linking four galaxy clusters (phys.org)

submitted 3 days ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Dark energy is the force believed to drive the expansion of the universe. The distance between galaxies continues to grow and the doesn't seem to be a good explanation for it yet. It's the "X" variable acting as a placeholder until that's answered. Or at least that is my understanding.

After reading the wikipedia article, that basic understanding of it might be correct, but I'm not an astrophysicist.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 days ago

Dark energy is basically a placeholder name. We have no direct evidence of it, but we indirectly know it has to exist due to other gravitational effects. As soon as we understand what it is the term "dark energy" will probably be replaced with whatever we discover to cause the observables currently attributed to dark energy, as dark energy is basically scientist for "no fucking idea why we observe these effects, but we do observe them". I'm not currently an astrophysicist but I spent time during undergrad as a research assistant on a LIGO project