The dark side of the universe

W.G.Ewald

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Cosmology: The dark side of the universe | The Economist

AT FIVE tonnes and 520 megapixels, it is the biggest digital camera ever built—which is fitting, because it is designed to tackle the biggest problem in the universe. On February 20th researchers at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory (pictured), which sits 2,200 metres (7,200 feet) above sea level in the Atacama desert of northern Chile, will begin installing this behemoth on a telescope called Blanco. It is the centrepiece of the Dark Energy Survey (DES), the most ambitious attempt yet to understand a mystery as perplexing as any that faces physics: what is driving the universe to expand at an ever greater rate.
 

Godless-Kafir

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Thats a pretty long article for an news media like the Economist!!! Just shows the dark and deep fudge the economy is in when you no longer have any news left on earth.

Anyway there is no action or pure and spontaneous action in the universe, everything is a reaction. That also encompasses Humans, there is no action in us we are merely reacting to every stumelie, so there is no one here doing anything it only the universe playing with itself.
 

Vyom

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Apparently, the red shift is the answer to problem.

The way to get around this is to stop thinking about distance and speed and to focus on properties that astronomers can measure directly. One thing that astronomers can actually measure is the redshift - as light travels through the expanding universe, the light gets stretched by the same factor that the universe does, causing its wavelength to increase. Since red light has longer wavelengths than blue light, this means that the color of light will move more toward the red end of the spectrum. And instead of distance, astronomers look at objects of known power inside the galaxies (typically type 1a supernovae) and measure how bright they appear. This is a bit like taking a 60-watt lightbulb and moving it to farther and farther distances. As long as we can be sure that the bulb remains at 60 watts, we know that the fainter it appears, the farther away it must be.
 

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