At Kitt Peak National Observatory in Arizona, a telescope has been working for three years to create a three-dimensional map of the sky. The Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) has been studying the light from millions of galaxies in an effort to understand dark energy, a mysterious force that makes up a majority of the energy in the universe.
Dark energy is thought to be responsible for pushing space apart in a way that goes against gravity. Scientists have long believed that the density of dark energy has remained constant since the beginning of the universe. However, DESI’s initial findings suggest that this assumption may not be accurate. There is a possibility that the density of dark energy has been changing over time, according to the scientists involved with the project.
Dr. Dragan Huterer from the University of Michigan, who worked on the project, described the findings as “bizarre.” If these results are confirmed, it could lead to a major crisis in the field of cosmology. The discovery that the density of dark energy has been fluctuating over time would shake up our understanding of the universe and how it has evolved over billions of years.
