High-resolution illustration of the Euclid and Roman spacecraft against a starry background.
Credits: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, ESA/ATG medialab
Since the 1990s, thanks to observations by the venerable Hubble Space Telescope (HST), astronomers have contemplated the mystery of cosmic expansion. While scientists have known about this since the late-1920s and early-30s, images acquired by Hubble‘s Ultra Deep Fields campaign revealed that the expansion has been accelerating for the past six billion years! This led scientists to reconsider Einstein’s theory that there is an unknown force in the Universe that “holds back gravity,” which he named the Cosmological Constant. To astronomers and cosmologists today, this force is known as “Dark Energy.”
However, not everyone is sold on the idea of Dark Energy, and some believe that cosmic expansion could mean there is a flaw in our understanding of gravity. In the near future, scientists will benefit from next-generation space telescopes to provide fresh insight into this mysterious force. These include the ESA’s Euclid mission, scheduled for launch this July, and NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope (RST), the direct successor to Hubble that will launch in May 2027. Once operational, these space telescopes will investigate these competing theories to see which holds up.
A new study from researchers from the University of British Columbia offers a new explanation of Dark Energy. Credit: NASA
Since the late 1920s, astronomers have been aware of the fact that the Universe is in a state of expansion. Initially predicted by Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity, this realization has gone on to inform the most widely-accepted cosmological model – the Big Bang Theory. However, things became somewhat confusing during the 1990s, when improved observations showed that the Universe’s rate of expansion has been accelerating for billions of years.
This led to the theory of Dark Energy, a mysterious invisible force that is driving the expansion of the cosmos. Much like Dark Matter which explained the “missing mass”, it then became necessary to find this elusive energy, or at least provide a coherent theoretical framework for it. A new study from the University of British Columbia (UBC) seeks to do just that by postulating the Universe is expanding due to fluctuations in space and time.
The study – which was recently published in the journal Physical Review D – was led by Qingdi Wang, a PhD student with the Department of Physics and Astronomy at UBC. Under the supervisions of UBC Professor William Unruh (the man who proposed the Unruh Effect) and with assistance from Zhen Zhu (another PhD student at UBC), they provide a new take on Dark Energy.
Diagram showing the Lambda-CBR universe, from the Big Bang to the the current era. Credit: Alex Mittelmann/Coldcreation
The team began by addressing the inconsistencies arising out of the two main theories that together explain all natural phenomena in the Universe. These theories are none other than General Relativity and quantum mechanics, which effectively explain how the Universe behaves on the largest of scales (i.e. stars, galaxies, clusters) and the smallest (subatomic particles).
Unfortunately, these two theories are not consistent when it comes to a little matter known as gravity, which scientists are still unable to explain in terms of quantum mechanics. The existence of Dark Energy and the expansion of the Universe are another point of disagreement. For starters, candidates theories like vacuum energy – which is one of the most popular explanations for Dark Energy – present serious incongruities.
According to quantum mechanics, vacuum energy would have an incredibly large energy density to it. But if this is true, then General Relativity predicts that this energy would have an incredibly strong gravitational effect, one which would be powerful enough to cause the Universe to explode in size. As Prof. Unruh shared with Universe Today via email:
“The problem is that any naive calculation of the vacuum energy gives huge values. If one assumes that there is some sort of cutoff so one cannot get energy densities much greater than the Planck energy density (or about 1095 Joules/meter³) then one finds that one gets a Hubble constant – the time scale on which the Universe roughly doubles in size – of the order of 10-44 sec. So, the usual approach is to say that somehow something reduces that down so that one gets the actual expansion rate of about 10 billion years instead. But that ‘somehow’ is pretty mysterious and no one has come up with an even half convincing mechanism.”
Timeline of the Big Bang and the expansion of the Universe. Credit: NASA
Whereas other scientists have sought to modify the theories of General Relativity and quantum mechanics in order to resolve these inconsistencies, Wang and his colleagues sought a different approach. As Wang explained to Universe Today via email:
“Previous studies are either trying to modify quantum mechanics in some way to make vacuum energy small or trying to modify General Relativity in some way to make gravity numb for vacuum energy. However, quantum mechanics and General Relativity are the two most successful theories that explain how our Universe works…Instead of trying to modify quantum mechanics or General Relativity, we believe that we should first understand them better. We takes the large vacuum energy density predicted by quantum mechanics seriously and just let them gravitate according to General Relativity without modifying either of them.”
For the sake of their study, Wang and his colleagues performed new sets of calculations on vacuum energy that took its predicted high energy density into account. They then considered the possibility that on the tiniest of scales – billions of times smaller than electrons – the fabric of spacetime is subject to wild fluctuations, oscillating at every point between expansion and contraction.
Could fluctuations at the tiniest levels of space time explain Dark Energy and the expansion of the cosmos? Credit: University of Washington
As it swings back and forth, the result of these oscillations is a net effect where the Universe expands slowly, but at an accelerating rate. After performing their calculations, they noted that such an explanation was consistent with both the existence of quantum vacuum energy density and General Relativity. On top of that, it is also consistent with what scientists have been observing in our Universe for almost a century. As Unruh described it:
“Our calculations showed that one could consistently regard [that] the Universe on the tiniest scales is actually expanding and contracting at an absurdly fast rate; but that on a large scale, because of an averaging over those tiny scales, physics would not notice that ‘quantum foam’. It has a tiny residual effect in giving an effective cosmological constant (dark energy type effect). In some ways it is like waves on the ocean which travel as if the ocean were perfectly smooth but really we know that there is this incredible dance of the atoms that make up the water, and waves average over those fluctuations, and act as if the surface was smooth.”
In contrast to conflicting theories of a Universe where the various forces that govern it cannot be resolved and must cancel each other out, Wang and his colleagues presents a picture where the Universe is constantly in motion. In this scenario, the effects of vacuum energy are actually self-cancelling, and also give rise to the expansion and acceleration we have been observing all this time.
While it may be too soon to tell, this image of a Universe that is highly-dynamic (even on the tiniest scales) could revolutionize our understanding of spacetime. At the very least, these theoretical findings are sure to stimulate debate within the scientific community, as well as experiments designed to offer direct evidence. And that, as we know, is the only way we can advance our understanding of this thing known as the Universe.
An international team of researchers have produced the largest 3-D map of the universe to date, which validates Einstein's theory of General Relativity. Credit: NAOJ/CFHT/ SDSS
On June 30th, 1905, Albert Einstein started a revolution with the publication of theory of Special Relativity. This theory, among other things, stated that the speed of light in a vacuum is the same for all observers, regardless of the source. In 1915, he followed this up with the publication of his theory of General Relativity, which asserted that gravity has a warping effect on space-time. For over a century, these theories have been an essential tool in astrophysics, explaining the behavior of the Universe on the large scale.
However, since the 1990s, astronomers have been aware of the fact that the Universe is expanding at an accelerated rate. In an effort to explain the mechanics behind this, suggestions have ranged from the possible existence of an invisible energy (i.e. Dark Energy) to the possibility that Einstein’s field equations of General Relativity could be breaking down. But thanks to the recent work of an international research team, it is now known that Einstein had it right all along.
It's confirmed that the universe is expanding with a uniform acceleration. Dark energy... not so much. Credit: Swinburne University.
[/caption]
The recent WiggleZ galaxy survey data further confirming that the universe is expanding with a uniform acceleration prompted a lot of ‘astronomers confirm dark energy’ headlines and a lot of heavy sighs from those preferring not to have the universe described in ten words or less.
I mean how the heck did ‘dark energy’ ever become shorthand for ‘the universe is expanding with a uniform acceleration’?
These ‘dark energy confirmed’ headlines risk developing a popular view that the universe is some kind of balloon that you have to pump energy into to make it expand. This is not an appropriate interpretation of the dark energy concept – which only came into common use after 1998 when Type 1a supernova data were announced, suggesting an accelerating expansion of the universe.
It was widely accepted well before then that the universe was expanding. A prevalent view before 1998 was that expansion might be driven by the outward momentum of the universe’s contents – a momentum possibly established from the initial cosmic inflation event that followed the Big Bang.
Current thinking on the expansion of the universe does not associate its expansion to the momentum of its contents. Instead the universe is thought of as raisin toast dough which expands in an oven – not because the raisins are pushing the dough outwards, but because the dough itself expands and as a consequence the distance between the raisins (i.e. galaxies etc) increases.
It’s not a perfect analogy since space-time is not a substance – and, at the level of a universe, the heat of the oven equates to the input of energy out of nowhere – and being thermal energy, it’s not dark.
Alternatively, you can model the universe as a perfect fluid where you think of dark energy as a negative pressure (since a positive pressure would compress the fluid). A negative pressure does not obviously require additional contents to be pumped into the fluid universe, although the physical nature of a ‘negative pressure’ in this context is yet to be explained.
Various possible shapes of the observable universe - where mass/energy density is too high, too low or just right (omega = 1), so that the geometry is Euclidean and the three angles of a triangle do add up to 180 degrees. Our universe does appear to have a flat Euclidean geometry, but it doesn't have enough visible mass/energy required to make it flat. Hence, we assume there must be a lot of dark stuff out there.
The requirement for dark energy in standard model cosmology is to sustain the observable flat geometry of space – which is presumed to be sustained by the mass-energy contents of the universe. Too much mass-energy should give a spherical shape to space, while too little mass-energy should give a hyperboloid shape.
So, since the universe is flat – and stays flat in the face of accelerating expansion, there must be a substantial ‘dark’ (i.e. undetectable) component. And it seems to be a component that grows as the universe increases in volume, in order to sustain that flat geometry – at least in current era of the universe’s evolution.
It is called ‘energy’ as it is evenly distributed (i.e. not prone to clumping, like dark matter), but otherwise it has no analogous properties with any form of energy that we know about.
More significantly, from this perspective, the primary requirement for dark energy is not as a driver of expansion, but as a hypothetical entity required to sustain the flatness of space in the face of expansion. This line of thinking then begs the question of just what does drive the accelerating expansion of the universe. And an appropriate answer to that question is – we haven’t a clue.
A plausible mechanism that accounts for the input of energy out of nowhere – and a plausible form of energy that is both invisible and that somehow generates the production of more space-time volume are all required to support the view that dark energy underlies the universe’s accelerating expansion.
Not saying it’s impossible, but no way has anyone confirmed that dark energy is real. Our flat universe is expanding with a uniform acceleration. For now, that is the news story.
