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Mysterious 'Dark Energy' May Not Exist


Claire.

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Mysterious 'Dark Energy' May Not Exist, Study Claims

The universe may not be expanding at an accelerating rate after all, meaning that mysterious "dark energy" might not actually exist, according to a new study.

This is quite the claim. In 2011, three cosmologists from two research teams won the Nobel Prize in physics for independently showing that distant Type Ia supernovas, which are a kind of exploding star, are moving away from Earth faster than nearby ones are.

These surprising results, which were published in the late 1990s, strongly suggested that some strange force must be spreading space-time apart. If no such force exists, the reasoning goes, then the expansion of the universe that began with the Big Bang 13.8 billion years ago should not be accelerating. Instead, it should be decreasing, slowed by the collective gravitational pull of all the galaxies, black holes and other matter in the cosmos. This hypothetical dispersive force came to be known as dark energy, because astronomers didn't really know what it was (and still don't, as a matter of fact).

But the new study, which was published online Friday (Oct. 21) in the journal Scientific Reports, questions this Nobel Prize-winning conclusion.

Read more: Space.com

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Hrmmzzz - the theory seems to have quite some holes in it, and does not explain background radiation, yet alternatively three independents came up with the same answer - dark energy. 

I do not think we will be abandoning the pursuit of Dark Energy based on this. 

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Radiation or no radiation does it really matter?

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No, Astronomers Haven't Decided Dark Energy is Nonexistent

This week, a number of media outlets have put out headlines like "The universe is expanding at an accelerating rate, or is it?” and “The Universe Is Expanding But Not At An Accelerating Rate New Research Debunks Nobel Prize Theory.” This excitement is due to a paper just published in Nature’s Scientific Reports called "Marginal evidence for cosmic acceleration from Type Ia supernovae,” by Nielsen, Guffanti and Sarkar.

Once you read the article, however, it’s safe to say there is no need to revise our present understanding of the universe. All the paper does is slightly reduce our certainty in what we know—and then only by discarding most of the cosmological data on which our understanding is based. It also ignores important details in the data it does consider. And even if you leave aside these issues, the headlines are wrong anyway. The study concluded that we’re now only 99.7 percent sure that the universe is accelerating, which is hardly the same as “it’s not accelerating.”

Read more: Scientific American

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I am sure there is a simple answer to this (!) The universe is full of photons flying about all over the place, and are detected when they interact with electrically charged particles. Could the universe also be full of gluons flying about all over the place, but there aren't enough quarks left for them to interact with - i.e. form nucleons. Hence, could all these "orphan" gluons - which can't be detected - actually be dark energy. 

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19 minutes ago, Derek Willis said:

I am sure there is a simple answer to this (!) The universe is full of photons flying about all over the place, and are detected when they interact with electrically charged particles. Could the universe also be full of gluons flying about all over the place, but there aren't enough quarks left for them to interact with - i.e. form nucleons. Hence, could all these "orphan" gluons - which can't be detected - actually be dark energy. 

Is that an idea original to you ?

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4 hours ago, Habitat said:

Is that an idea original to you ?

It was original to me in the sense that I just thought of it. But whether other people have thought of it also, I do not know. I am sure other people will have made the same suggestion, but I haven't trawled through the literature or internet to see if that is the case.

Edit: If you have seen the suggestion elsewhere - and perhaps the reasons why it is wrong - I would be grateful for any links. 

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8 hours ago, Derek Willis said:

It was original to me in the sense that I just thought of it. But whether other people have thought of it also, I do not know. I am sure other people will have made the same suggestion, but I haven't trawled through the literature or internet to see if that is the case.

Edit: If you have seen the suggestion elsewhere - and perhaps the reasons why it is wrong - I would be grateful for any links. 

OK, I see what you mean. I have no idea if it could be an explanation.

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14 hours ago, Derek Willis said:

I am sure there is a simple answer to this (!) The universe is full of photons flying about all over the place, and are detected when they interact with electrically charged particles. Could the universe also be full of gluons flying about all over the place, but there aren't enough quarks left for them to interact with - i.e. form nucleons. Hence, could all these "orphan" gluons - which can't be detected - actually be dark energy. 

I think that is unlikely.

Photons interact with charge, as you say, but photons themselves are neutral. This means photons cannot interact with each other.

Gluons interact with ``colour'' (a quantum number possessed by quarks), however gluons themselves also have colour. This means gluons can interact with each other and even self-interact.

Because of this interaction, there cannot be a background of gluons flying around. The gluons would group together to form colour-neutral ``glueballs''. However the energy of this multi-gluon object would be sufficient for that object to decay into more conventional subatomic particles such as pions (which in turn would decay into photons, electrons, and neutrinos).

So it is an interesting idea, but I do not think it is possible within our current theory of gluons. They are too energetic and too interactive to go unnoticed, and too unstable to exist independently for very long.

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8 hours ago, sepulchrave said:

I think that is unlikely.

Photons interact with charge, as you say, but photons themselves are neutral. This means photons cannot interact with each other.

Gluons interact with ``colour'' (a quantum number possessed by quarks), however gluons themselves also have colour. This means gluons can interact with each other and even self-interact.

Because of this interaction, there cannot be a background of gluons flying around. The gluons would group together to form colour-neutral ``glueballs''. However the energy of this multi-gluon object would be sufficient for that object to decay into more conventional subatomic particles such as pions (which in turn would decay into photons, electrons, and neutrinos).

So it is an interesting idea, but I do not think it is possible within our current theory of gluons. They are too energetic and too interactive to go unnoticed, and too unstable to exist independently for very long.

Thanks for that. I did say at the beginning of my post that I was sure there would be a simple answer to my suggestion. I had read about glueballs, and also how despite them having energy ranges that ought to be detectable with, for example, the LHC, so far none have been detected. That made me wonder if for some reason glueballs rarely, if ever, actually form. Perhaps in the vastness of the universe, the gluons - in the short time they "fizz" in and out of the vacuum - never come close enough to one another to form glueballs? The level of particle physics here is way beyond my abilities, so I will leave it at that.  

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Very interesting and satisfying news, thanks for sharing :) hopefully there is much to be changed about our understanding and time has finally come for that.

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