Everything we know about the universe and all the laws of physics, apply to four percent of the universe. The other 96 percent are the unknown phenomena of dark matter and dark energy. “If we account for all the matter and energy that we’re familiar with,” says Neil deGrasse Tyson, “and measure up how much gravity it should have, it’s one-sixth of the gravity that’s actually operating on the universe. We call that dark matter. It really should be called dark gravity. and we don’t know what that is.”
Scientists suggest that a counter-intuitive, hypothetical species of black holes may negate the standard model of cosmology,where dark energy is an inherent and constant property of spacetime that will result in an eventual cold death of the universe. “It’s the big elephant in the room,” says Claudia de Rham, a theoretical physicist at Imperial College London about dark energy, the mysterious, elusive phenomena that pushes the cosmos to expand so rapidly and which is estimated to account for 70% of the contents of the universe. “It’s very frustrating.”
It’s been said that maps codify the miracle of existence. Often referred to as the “cosmic genome” project, the new Sloan Digital Sky Survey is the largest three-dimensional map of the universe ever created, filling in the most significant gaps in its history.
The universe we see –stars, moons, planets, galaxies– is but a small, accidental tip of an infinite cosmic iceberg. During the epoch of inflation, thought to have been triggered by the phase transition that marked the end of the grand unification at approximately 10−36 seconds after the Big Bang, the accelerating expansion of space was far more dramatic than in today’s universe, expanding at an absolutely staggering rate, tearing space asunder. During this period no objects—even two elementary particles—remained close enough to one another for long enough to interact.
The German-Russian, eRosita space telescope mounted on the Spectrum-Roentgen-Gamma (SRG) was launched in July of 2019. Rotating at an observing position some 1.5 million kilometers from Earth, the spacecraft has created a seminal 3D map from 165 gigabytes of data, recording over a million violent sources of X-rays in the cosmos that reveals how the universe accelerates under the mysterious force called dark energy. The X-ray eye is expected to detect up to three million supermassive black holes, many of which will be new to science, including both obscured and unobscured objects, providing a unique view of the evolution of the supermassive objects within the emerging cosmos.
“Eventually we reach the utmost limits of our telescopes –there we measure shadows, and we search among the ghostly errors of measurement for landmarks that are scarcely more substantial,” said Edwin Hubble in 1929, creator of Hubble’s law that observed that the further galaxies are, the faster they are moving away from Earth –the “red shift.” Predictions of Hubble’s Constant from the standard cosmological model when applied to new measurements of the cosmic microwave background (CMB)—the leftover radiation from the Big Bang—have produced a value of 67.4, a significant and troubling difference. This difference, which astronomers say is one of the fundamental problems in all of physics, is beyond the experimental errors in the observations.
