Astrophysicists Just Made a New Count of All the Dark Matter and Dark Energy in the Universe

A new analysis of more than 1,500 supernovae has given fresh precision to the measurement of dark matter and dark energy.

Two-thirds of the universe is made up of dark energy and the other third is made up of matter. We only know that it is there because we can measure its effects. Less than 5% of the universe is regular matter. The Astrophysical Journal contains an analysis by the team.

The results have implications for the measurement of the Hubble constant. The number has been a puzzle for a long time because it varies greatly depending on where you measure it.

The paper suggests that the universe behaves in the way that can be explained by the simplest theory. The Hubble tension is brought to a new level by our same dataset. In a moment, we'll talk about that tension.

Dark matter is the mass in the universe that we can't see directly, but it has an effect on the universe. There are a number of dark matter candidates, including axions, WIMPs, and other particles. It is called dark energy because we don't know what it is.

The rate of the universe's expansion was looked at by Pantheon+. The redshift of the supernovae can be used to figure out how fast the universe has expanded.

Pantheon is an analysis of about 1000 supernovae. The new work is twice as precise as the previous one. The measurement of the universe's structure and its most ancient light, the Cosmic Microwave Background, were combined with the Pantheon+ results.

Some of the best events in the universe can be found in type Ia supernovaes. The supernovae that happened in the distant universe are redshifted. As the universe expands, the light travels through it with a longer wavelength than when it was emitted.

The data from Pantheon+ was combined with data from SH0ES to calculate the local Hubble constant or how fast the universe appears to be expanding. The data yielded a constant of over 70 miles per second. The Hubble constant uses the oldest light in the universe to calculate it. The Hubbard tension is a discrepancy between local and distant measurement.

There is only a one-in-a-million chance that the Hubble constant measurement discrepancy is not a real thing.