The universe is expanding at an accelerating rate, and scientists don’t know why. 🤔
Dark Energy Survey scientists search galaxy images for more subtle distortions due to dark matter bending space, an effect called weak gravitational lensing. The strength of gravity determines the size and distribution of dark matter structures, and the size and distribution in turn determine how warped those galaxies appear to us – you might have seen this recently in the images from the James Webb telescope!
That’s how images can reveal the strength of gravity at different distances from Earth and distant times throughout the universe’s history. The group has now measured the shapes of over 100 million galaxies, and so far, the observations match what’s predicted by Einstein’s theory.
The groundwork laid by the Dark Energy Survey will feed into two upcoming missions: the ESA (European Space Agency) Euclid mission, slated for launch no earlier than 2023, and NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, slated for no later than May 2027. Both will search for changes in the strength of gravity over time or distance. Like the Dark Energy Survey, Euclid and Roman will search for only subtle changes – ones too small to affect, say, the motion of the planets in our solar system but still significant enough to affect the distribution of matter throughout the universe over billions of years.
📸: James Webb telescope
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