The most precise measurements ever made of the universe’s composition and how fast it is expanding suggest “something is fishy” in our understanding of the cosmos, the astrophysicist who led the research said Wednesday.
The comprehensive new study published in The Astrophysical Journal further confirmed that there is a significant discrepancy between two different ways to estimate the speed at which the universe is expanding.
The study said that around five percent of the universe is made up of what we might think of as normal matter, while the rest is dark matter and dark energy — both of which remain shrouded in mystery.
Dark energy, a hypothetical force causing the universe to expand at an ever-increasing rate, makes up 66.2 percent of the cosmos, according to the study published in The Astrophysical Journal.
The remaining 33.8 percent is a combination of matter and dark matter, which is also unknown but may consist of some as-yet-undiscovered subatomic particle.
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To arrive at the most precise limits yet put on what our universe is made up of, an international team of researchers observed exploding stars called supernovae.
They analysed the light from 1,550 different supernovae, ranging from close to home to more than 10 billion lights year away, back when the universe was a quarter of its current age.
“We can compare them and see how the universe is behaving and evolving over time,” said Dillon Brout of the Harvard–Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and lead author of the study, called Pantheon+.
Read more: AP
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