Echoes Hint At Accelerating Universe Expansion

cr0kin0le writes "400,000 years after the Big Bang, oscillations between gravitationally contracting matter and outward radiation pressure left newly discovered acoustic echoes. Independent teams from U. of Arizona and U. of Durham, England have found circular ripples with wavelengths of 500 million light-years which indirectly imply that universal expansion is accelerating due to dark energy."

Comments

Re:someone remind me...

[The Datamangler]

That's what I thought too, but no. It seems dark energy is stuff we can't see using traditional electromagnetic methods. It seems that vacuum energy may be one of the sources of dark energy- there is energy associated with the vacuum of space. If you place 2 metal plates parallel to each other, there is an energy potential between them caused by the vacuum of space(Casimir effect). Kip Thorne describes how to make a time machine this way with sufficiently large plates. (sufficiently large is pretty fu***n big) Also, you may have read that in deep space subatomic particles pop in and out of existence- this is part of the dark energy, too, and somehow related to vacuum energy. For a mildly technical discussion go to http://www.astro.ucla.edu/~wright/cosmo_constant.h tml Also, I recommend Brian Greene's "The elegant Universe" for a superb laymans terms description of the state of knowledge and confusion in astrophysics.