Galaxy Clusters' Stunted Growth Confirms Dark Energy

A new study of 86 galaxy clusters in the early universe has provided independent confirmation of the existence of dark energy. In its absence, gravity's pull should have caused the number of clusters to increase by a factor of 50 over the last 5.5 billion years. What is observed is a factor of 10 increase. "Together with earlier observations... the new data strengthen the suspicion — but do not prove — that dark energy is a weird antigravity called the cosmological constant that was hypothesized and then abandoned by Albert Einstein as a 'blunder' almost a century ago. If that is true, the universe is fated to empty itself out eventually, and all but the Milky Way's closest neighbors will eventually be out of sight. ... Adam Riess of Johns Hopkins and the Space Telescope Science Institute, said: 'If this was a fox hunt and dark energy was the fox, I think they have closed off another escape route. But there is still a lot of terrain left for the fox, and we've seen little more than a glimmer of fur.'"

Comments

Re:The Ultimate Fate of the Universe

[ChangelingJane]

Until they find yet another force we didn't know about, and the model changes again... Hopefully this will keep happening over and over, because all of these different end-of-the-universe theories are morbidly fascinating.

Matter and Energy...or not?

[ghostdoc]

So let me get this straight...we have Dark Matter because there's not enough gravity within a galaxy to explain the observations, and Dark Energy because there's too much gravity between galaxies to explain the observations.

Surely Occam's Razor comes into play here? Surely it's obviously simpler to say 'we've got the maths wrong for gravity beyond solar system scale' and start again at the chalkboard?

Re:Matter and Energy...or not?

[Kjella]

Surely Occam's Razor comes into play here? Surely it's obviously simpler to say 'we've got the maths wrong for gravity beyond solar system scale' and start again at the chalkboard?

Well, from what I've understood adjusting the constant of gravity would explain some things but would make other predictions incorrect again. All in all, dark matter / dark energy is causing less headaches than the opposite, so unless you can pair it off with some other theory to make the world right again it won't get accepted.

Re:Matter and Energy...or not?

[Abcd1234]

I have to agree with ghostdoc. IANAP

Obviously. If you were even passingly familiar with the area, you'd realize that a) people *have* been re-examining the orthodoxy (see MOND, among other things), because, you know, some scientists are as smart as you (or perhaps even smarter) and realize that it's an interesting area of research, and b) no one has found an alternate theory that explains the current set of observations (see the Bullet Cluster, and some even more recent results).

Honestly, what is it with laymen who somehow believe that *they* have some insight into an area that those who've been studying it their entire lives do not?

Alternative explanation

[EdibleEchidna]

Instead of proving the existence of Dark Energy, perhaps what this finding really does is prove that our models are wrong.

I often wonder if we're looking in the wrong place for an explanation...flaws in our cosmology sound more plausible to me than weird forms of matter and energy.