SOME people were beginning to wonder if it was just an illusion, but it looks as if dark energy is real and here to stay.
Dark energy was dreamed up to explain why the expansion of the universe appears to be speeding up. Since then, astronomers have struggled to explain what dark energy actually is - leading to speculation that it may not exist at all. For instance, some claim that an uneven distribution of matter within the universe could be distorting our measurements of the distance to supernovae, fooling us into thinking that they are moving away faster than they really are (New Scientist, 8 March, p 32).
In a bid to solve the dark energy question once and for all, István Szapudi at the University of Hawaii in Honolulu turned to the cosmic microwave background - the radiation left behind by the big bang. Detailed maps of ...
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