NASA and DoE Team On Dark Energy Research

Roland Piquepaille writes "NASA and the U.S. Department of Energy have teamed up to operate the future Joint Dark Energy Mission. As you probably know, recent astronomical measurements have showed that about 72% of the total energy in the universe is dark energy, even if scientists don't know much about it, but speculate that it is present almost since the beginning of our Universe more than 13 billion years ago. The JDEM 'mission will make precise measurements of the expansion rate of the universe to understand how this rate has changed with time. These measurements will yield vital clues about the nature of dark energy.' The launch of a spacecraft for the JDEM mission is not planned before 2015."

Comments

What do you have against aether?

[blancolioni]

The idea of a luminiferous aether followed naturally from the observation that light acted like a wave, and one of the fundamental things about waves is that they travelled in a medium.

This lead to experiments designed to detect the medium of light (like the famous Michelson-Morley one), to the Lorentz transformations and the Theory of Relativity. The aether conjecture is science at its best: hypothesis, experiment, falsification, paradigm shift. Why it's used as a metaphor for stupidity has always been a mystery to me.

Re:Dark Matter/Emergy Does Not Exist

[Ginger Unicorn]

Does this temper your skepticism any?

I find it hard to accept the idea that some lone guy on slashdot has found a problem in the maths used by all the astronomers in the world who describe galaxy rotation, or indeed that even if you had, it seems galaxy rotation is not the sole piece of evidence for dark matter.