Dark energy

Misconceptions skewered

I was surfing the web the other day, and I came across Sean Carroll’s Preposterous Universe blog. There's a post on there called True Facts About Cosmology (or, Misconceptions Skewered). I thought it looked interesting, because that’s my kind of thing. I do so dislike all the popscience and the lies to children, and it pleases me to see somebody else trying to put the record straight. But has he? I thought I’d take a look and give my opinion. Carroll leads in with something about…

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Dark energy

Dark energy is said to be a mystery. Google on dark energy mystery and you can find plenty of material saying as much. Such as dark energy: the biggest mystery in the universe by Richard Panek in the Smithsonian magazine. Or dark energy: mystery of the millennium by Thanu Padmanabhan on the arXiv. Dark energy comes above dark matter in 10 greatest unsolved mysteries in physics on IFL science, and since it’s circa 68% of the mass-energy of the universe as opposed to 27% for dark…

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A compressed prehistory of dark energy

In the Wikipedia dark energy article you can read how the term "dark energy" was coined by Michael Turner in 1998. This was in a paper co-authored with Dragan Huterer called prospects for probing the dark energy via supernova distance measurements. It referred to the type 1a supernovae observations made by the Supernova Cosmology Project and by the High-Z Supernova Search Team. Their observations indicated that the expansion of the universe is accelerating, which was contrary to expectations and led to Nobel prizes in 2011: Expanding…

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