WASHINGTON: "Dark energy" does exist, and it's not Albert Einstein's "greatest blunder" in his theory of gravity, say planetary scientists.
"Dark energy" is a concept first cast by Einstein in his original 'Theory of General Relativity' . The scientist included the idea in his original equations but later ruefully admitted that it was "his greatest blunder" .
Now, a survey of 200,000 galaxies by an international team, led by Chris Blake of Swinburne University, has shown that "dark energy" , responsible for expanding the universe , is real and not a mistake in Einstein's theory of gravity.
Using the Anglo-Australian Telescope, the team of 26 planetary scientists contributed to the "WiggleZ Dark Energy Survey" which mapped distribution of galaxies over a volume of the Universe. Because light takes so long to reach Earth, it was the equivalent of looking seven billion years back in time — more than half way back to the Big Bang.
The survey, which took four years to complete, aimed to measure the properties of "dark energy" — the concept of which was revived in the late 1990s when astronomers began to realise the universe was expanding at an accelerating rate. "The acceleration was a shocking discovery, because it showed we have a lot more to learn about physics. Astronomers began to think that Einstein's blunder wasn't a blunder at all and that the universe really was filled with a new kind of energy that was causing it to expand at an increasing speed," Blake said.
Team member Warrick Couch said confirming the existence of the anti-gravity agent is a significant step forward in understanding the Universe.