Can We Outrun Dark Energy In The Race To See The Universe?
Everything is being driven apart. But there’s hope of reaching what’s currently so far away.
For the first 7.8 billion years, the Universe unfolded exactly as scientists would have expected in the aftermath of the Big Bang. The Universe started off expanding at a tremendously rapid rate, while the gravitational influence of all the matter and energy worked to slow that expansion down. In many ways, the expanding Universe was a race between these two contenders: the initial expansion, which drives the material in the Universe apart, and gravitation, which works to pull everything back together. The Universe was a race, and the Big Bang was a starting gun.
But about 6 billion years ago, the unexpected occurred. The initial expansion didn’t win; gravitation didn’t win; nor did the two add up to some perfectly balanced tie. Instead, an extra effects began to show up, as though some new phenomenon was causing the expansion rate to speed up once again. This phenomenon — known today as dark energy — was first uncovered back in the 1990s, and the evidence for it has grown to reach overwhelming proportions today. It leads to an unsettling, empty, lonely fate for our Universe, but we still have some hope of outrunning it. Here’s how.
