9 billion-year-old ‘Dark Energy’ reported

[UM-Bot]

Image credit: NASA/ESA/ESO

A strange thing happened to the universe five billion years ago. As if God had turned on an antigravity machine, the expansion of the cosmos speeded up, and galaxies began moving away from one another at an ever faster pace.Now a group of astronomers using the Hubble Space Telescope have discovered that billions of years before this mysterious antigravity overcame cosmic gravity and sent the galaxies scooting apart like muscle cars departing a tollbooth, it was already present in space, affecting the evolution of the cosmos.“We see it doing its thing, starting to fight against ordinary gravity,” Adam Riess of the Space Telescope Science Institute said about the antigravity force, known as dark energy. He is the leader of a team of “dark energy prospectors,” as he calls them, who peered back nine billion years with the Hubble and were able to discern the nascent effects of antigravity.

The group reported their observations at a news conference yesterday and in a paper to be published in The Astrophysical Journal.The results, Dr. Riess and others said, provide clues and place new limits on the nature of dark energy, a mystery that has thrown physics and cosmology into turmoil over the last decade. “It gives us the ability to look at changes in dark energy,” he said in an interview. “Previously, we knew nothing about that. That’s really exciting.”

View: Full Article | Source: New York Times

[Shuriken]

another piece of the puzzle suggesting, that our universe was indeed created artificialy by closly observed process.

[Blizno]

another piece of the puzzle suggesting, that our universe was indeed created artificialy by closly observed process.

Wow. I'm stunned that you could possibly have stretched that conclusion out of this story. Amazing.

I hope you realize that "As if God had turned on an antigravity machine..." is somebody's attempt to be clever. Is that sentence what led you to your conclusion?

[Shuriken]

no...

[ROGER]

I am with Shuriken on this one. The Schools tell us that the Brain and there fore the Mind of Man is Electro Chemical in nature. Not very powerful in the great scheme of things.

Now the Universe is comprised of Very Large areas of Mater , Dark Mater, Energy , anti energy. All in quantities we still can not comprehend. So why can the Universe not organize this energy in to the equivalent of a Massive Mind. One that thinks and lives on a level we small humans can not understand.

This (Hypothetical) Being would be as a God to us Small Humans. And if you look for a Grand Design in what we see around us , cant there at least be an Organizing mind behind some of it?

In an Episode of Star Trek-N.G. Humans were referred to as "Ugly Bags of mostly Water" by another life form.. Pretty close I think!

[Blizno]

I am with Shuriken on this one. The Schools tell us that the Brain and there fore the Mind of Man is Electro Chemical in nature. Not very powerful in the great scheme of things.

Now the Universe is comprised of Very Large areas of Mater , Dark Mater, Energy , anti energy. All in quantities we still can not comprehend. So why can the Universe not organize this energy in to the equivalent of a Massive Mind. One that thinks and lives on a level we small humans can not understand.

This (Hypothetical) Being would be as a God to us Small Humans. And if you look for a Grand Design in what we see around us , cant there at least be an Organizing mind behind some of it?

In an Episode of Star Trek-N.G. Humans were referred to as "Ugly Bags of mostly Water" by another life form.. Pretty close I think!

I understand that logic but an organizing mind is not needed. The universe makes sense, the little bit of it that we understand. We don't find any evidence of ghosts or gods. There's no reason to think that ghosts or gods are needed to explain the part of the universe that we don't understand yet.

Furthermore, instead of looking for a "Grand Design", why not just observe the universe with an open mind? Observe something, gather as much information as you can, make hypotheses about the causes of the thing and then test your hypotheses. If your hypotheses are proven wrong, come up with better ones. Keep refining your understanding.

Sure, there could be an organizing mind behind everything. There could be one or more gods that caused the Big Bang to happen. However, since we can explain so much that we see without resorting to creating gods, why assume that the part we don't yet know requires gods?

Why make things more complicated by adding overarching intelligences?