"Hubble Science"
"Dark Energy: A Mysterious Force"
Because the Hubble Space Telescope is operating so well and is so scientifically effective right now,
scientists are using Hubble to investigate some of the deepest mysteries of the universe.
One mystery is dark energy, that's the name just kind of
plastered on this phenomenon that Hubble and other telescopes together,
we found that the universe expansion has been accelerating for the last few billion years.
Well, what is causing that? We don't know, it's something about a repulsive force that we may not
fully understand, or new physics that we don't fully understand. But Hubble was used along,
in complement, with some telescopes on the ground to determine that the expansion of the universe
is in fact accelerating by something we're now calling dark energy, and without Hubble, we
would have not been able to make this detection, which is now a Nobel Prize winning discovery.
This explains why the universe appears to be accelerating now, when it used to be slowing
down because of gravity. So now the question is, well, is this a simple story or is it complicated?
Is there more than one kind of dark energy? Has the dark energy itself changed over time?
So Hubble is now being used to refine, even further, that expansion rate of the universe
in our current epoch, and trying to compare that to what might be predicted
from looking at other measurements of the universe with other telescopes.
Right now, we're finding a discrepancy between what we might have expected and
what we're actually measuring. So that's one realm where Hubble is really at the
cutting edge of helping us understand, or at least open up new mysteries of the universe.
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