Dark Energy Confirmed

bill_mcgonigle writes "By correlating the results of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey and the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe, astronomers have confirmed the existence of dark energy. While gravity attracts, dark energy repels, so by comparing the positions of millions of galaxies and their red-shifts with the temperature map of the early universe, evidence was found for dark energy on the scale of 100 million light years. "Dark energy, whatever it is, is something that is not attracted by gravity" said David Spergel, a Princeton University cosmologist and a member of the WMAP science team. "We are finding that most of the stuff in our universe is abnormal in that it is gravitationally repulsive rather than gravitationally attractive," said Albert Stebbins of the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory. The universe is expanding at an accelerating rate, a switch that happened about 6.3 billion years ago, before which the expansion was decelerating."

Comments

Normal vs Abnormal

[Inexile2002]

"We are finding that most of the stuff in our universe is abnormal in that it is gravitationally repulsive rather than gravitationally attractive..."

How can most of the universe be abnormal. Wouldn't the majority of the universe be "normal"? If most of the universe is repulsive instead of attractive (why did I think of the last three blind dates I've been on when I wrote that) then wouldn't repulsive be "normal". Right?

Damn, now I'm thinking of Karen... talk about repulsive being normal.

Oh. It's not `dork matters`. D'oh!

[AtariAmarok]

I misread this at first, I thought it was some sort of reference to the Slashdot motto "news for nerds, stuff that matters". My mistake.

Judging from my single status..

[NanoGator]

... I'd say that I'm the MASTER OF DARK ENERGY! Buaahaha