Albert Einstein's theory of gravity is a big puzzle in astrophysics. The study was co-authored by NASA scientists.
Scientists don't know why the universe is growing so fast. It's as if you threw an apple in the air and it went up, up and away. Dark energy is a mystery.
A new study from the international Dark Energy Survey is trying to determine if expectations for how gravity works at the scale of the whole universe are flawed or incomplete. Scientists may be able to explain dark energy. The study found that the current understanding of Einstein's theory of gravity is correct.
A group of scientists, including some from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, presented the results of their work at the international conference on particle physics and astronomy. The work helps set the stage for two upcoming space telescopes that will probe our understanding of gravity with even higher precision than the new study.
More than a century ago, Albert Einstein developed his Theory of General Relativity to describe gravity, and so far it has predicted the existence of black holes. Some scientists argue that if the theory can't explain dark energy, then maybe they need to modify it.
Members of the Dark Energy Survey looked for evidence thatgravity's strength has varied throughout the universe's history. A positive finding would show that Einstein's theory isn't complete. They looked at data from other telescopes as well and came to the same conclusion.
Einstein's theory continues to work according to the study. There is no explanation for dark energy at this time. NASA's Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope is one of two upcoming missions that will be supported by this research. The strength of gravity will be searched for by both telescopes.
The vision is blurry.
Scientists don't know what happened in the past. By looking at something far away. The light-year is the distance light can travel in a year. An object one light-year away appears to us the same way it did a year ago. Billions of years ago, the universe appeared to us as it does today. About 5 billion years ago, the study looked at the universe. Roman will look at 11 billion years in the past.
The strength of gravity is not revealed by the galaxies themselves, but how they look when viewed from Earth. Dark matter doesn't emit, reflect, or interact with light. Scientists don't know what it's made of but they know it's there because of the large amount of dark matter in our universe. When light travels through space, it warps portions of the space, causing images of distant galaxies to look different. This was on display in one of the first images from the space telescope.
Scientists from the Dark Energy Survey look for more subtle distortions in the images of the stars. The size and distribution of dark matter can be determined by the strength of gravity. It is possible to see the strength of gravity at different distances from Earth. The group has measured the shapes of over 100 million galaxies and so far they match what Einstein predicted.
Agns Ferté, the study co-author, said that there is still room to challenge Einstein's theory of gravity. We have a lot of work to do before we're ready for Roman. As we've done with the Dark Energy Survey, we need to continue collaborating with scientists around the world.
More information: Dark Energy Survey Year 3 Results: Constraints on extensions to ΛCDM with weak lensing and galaxy clustering, arXiv:2207.05766 [astro-ph.CO] arxiv.org/abs/2207.05766
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