Einstein proved right over universe: It is expanding at EXACTLY the speed he predicted - driven by 'dark energy'
- Dark energy was only discovered 14 years ago
- Theory predicts how fast galaxies are moving apart
- Einstein's brain now on display at the Wellcome Trust in London
Albert Einstein: He was right about the expansion of the universe
Albert Einstein has been proved correct in his view of how the universe is expanding, according to a scientific study released today.
The new test of Einstein's view of the universe has proved him right with ‘incredible accuracy’ and is helping scientists to understand the mysterious acceleration of the universe.
A team of cosmologists have announced at the National Astronomy Meeting being held at the University of Manchester the most accurate measurement ever made from when the expansion of the universe began to accelerate.
It means that the phenomenon can be explained using just Einstein's general theory of relativity and the cosmological constant - the simplest theoretical explanation for the acceleration of the universe.
The results will be used to understand what is causing the acceleration and why, and will shed new light on dark energy - the name adopted for the fundamental agent driving the acceleration about which little is known.
The cosmologists from the University of Portsmouth and the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics have examined the period between five and six billion years ago when the universe was almost half its present age and made measurements of extraordinary accuracy - within 1.7 per cent.
The findings support Einstein's general theory of relativity which predicts how fast galaxies, separated by large distances, should be moving toward one another and at what rate the structure of the universe should be growing.
The conclusions are consistent with the concordance model of a universe that bloomed from the big bang 13.7billion years ago.
Team member Dr Rita Tojeiro said: ‘The results are the best measurement of an intergalactic distance ever made, which means cosmologists are closer than ever to understanding why the universe's expansion is accelerating.
‘One of the great things about Einstein's general theory of relativity is that it is testable. Our results support the theory and are fully consistent with the notion that constant vacuum energy - empty space creating a repulsive force - is driving the acceleration of the universe.
‘These are profound statements that describe the physics of our universe at the most fundamental level.
‘Critically, the results find no evidence that dark energy is simply an illusion stemming from our poor understanding of the laws of gravity - Einstein's theory has passed its most stringent test yet at extra-galactic scales.’
Jeff Forshaw, professor of theoretical physics at the University of Manchester and co-author with Brian Cox of The Quantum Universe: Everything That Can Happen Does Happen, underlined just how important the study has been.
He told MailOnline: 'Understanding the cosmological constant represents possibly the biggest unsolved mystery in physics. Einstein's theory anticipates its existence but modern theories of particle physics fail spectacularly to predict its value. Accurate measurements like these are vital in order to unravel this conundrum.'
Ironically, he added, Einstein thought his cosmological constant was a mistake and didn't like it at all.
The experiment was designed to follow up on an observation made in 1998, when scientists studied the brightness of mighty stellar explosions to deduce that the universe's expansion is, against all odds and against our understanding of fundamental physics, becoming increasingly fast.
The new discoveries are based on work by a collaboration of astronomers from across the globe representing the Baryon Acoustic Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (BOSS), part of the third Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS-III), which is mapping the three-dimensional positions of more than one million galaxies.
Way to grow: The universe began 13.7billion years ago and is now expanding at a mind-boggling rate, for reasons that have yet to be discovered
Professor Will Percival, head of this team at the university's Institute of Cosmology and Gravitation, said: ‘Dark Energy was only discovered 14 years ago, and there's this feeling that we are still riding the wave of discovery.
‘It's a very exciting time to be a cosmologist.’
‘We see the influence of dark energy on cosmic structure, but we have no idea what it is. The data gathered by this survey will help answer that question,’ said Daniel Eisenstein from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and the director of SDSS-III.
Maps of the universe like BOSS’s show that galaxies and clusters of galaxies are clumped together into walls and filaments, with giant voids between. These structures grew out of subtle variations in density in the early universe, which bore the imprint of “baryon acoustic oscillations” -- pressure-driven acoustic (sound) waves that passed through the early universe.
Billions of years later, the record of these sound waves can still be read in our universe.
‘Because of the regularity of the ancient sound waves, there’s a slightly increased probability that any two galaxies today will be separated by about 500 million light-years, rather than 400 million or 600 million,’ said Eisenstein.
In a graph of the number of galaxy pairs by separation distance, that magic number of 500 million light-years shows up as a peak, so astronomers often speak of the ‘peak separation’. The position of this peak depends on the amount of dark energy in the universe. But measuring the distance between galaxies depends critically on having the right distances to the galaxies in the first place.
That’s where BOSS comes in. ‘We’ve detected the peak separation more clearly than ever before,’ said Nikhil Padmanabhan of Yale University. ‘These measurements allow us to determine the contents of the universe with unprecedented accuracy.’
Meanwhile, Einstein's brain has gone on show as a star attraction at an exhibition of human brains.
Slice of genius: Two sections of Einstein's brain are on display at the Wellcome Trust in London
Other brains on display at The Wellcome Trust, London, include those of Charles Babbage and William Burke.
The exhibition, Brains: the mind as matter, includes more than 150 objects such as rare images of real brains, artworks, manuscripts, artefacts, videos and photography.
Curator Dr Marius Kwint, art historian and University of Portsmouth lecturer in visual culture, said: ‘The exhibition shows how a single, fragile organ has become the object of modern society's most profound hopes, fears and beliefs, and some of its most extreme practices and advanced technologies.
‘The different ways in which we have treated and represented real, physical brains open up a lot of questions about our collective minds.
‘The brain is the most complex entity in the known universe and the exhibition is a fascinating exploration of how humans have tried to come to terms with this infinitely mysterious organ.’
The comments below have not been moderated.
We are no longer accepting comments on this article.