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posted by chromas on Wednesday October 30 2019, @01:23AM   Printer-friendly

'First Light' Achieved on an Experiment That Could Crack The Mystery of Dark Energy

On October 22, the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) on the Mayall Telescope in Arizona, US, achieved first light. This is a huge leap in our ability to measure galaxy distances – enabling a new era of mapping the structures in the Universe.

As its name indicates, it may also be key to solving one of the biggest questions in physics: what is the mysterious force dubbed "dark energy" that makes up the 70 percent of the Universe?

[...] DESI should also be able to constrain, and even kill, many theories of modified gravity, possibly providing an emphatic confirmation of Einstein's Theory of General Relativity on the largest scales.

Or the opposite – and again that would spark a revolution in theoretical physics.

Another important theory that will be tested with DESI is Inflation, which predicts that tiny random quantum fluctuations of energy density in the primordial Universe were exponentially expanded during a short period of intense growth to become the seeds of the large scale structures we see today.

DESI is only one of several next generation dark energy missions and experiments coming in the next decade, so there's certainly reason to be optimistic that we could soon solve the mystery of dark energy.

Also at BBC.


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  • (Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Wednesday October 30 2019, @09:39PM

    by maxwell demon (1608) on Wednesday October 30 2019, @09:39PM (#913894) Journal

    From the dark-light dept.

    --
    The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
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