Another end-of-the-world scenario has come and gone......who will be the next circus we all have to endure?
Science moves on regardless and new research has been published that shows Einstein was right as to his "Cosmological Constant" in his theory of relativity. Einstein's equations showed that the Universe was not static, but in motion. He did away with this constant, not believing it true and later admitted it was his biggest miscalculation.
You may not be aware of this, but the Universe is made up of 4% ordinary matter - stars, people, planets, another 22% is dark matter ( we don't know what this is), and the rest about 74% is dark energy. This dark energy is causing the galaxies to accelerate in their expansion - the Universe is literally flying apart. The newly installed Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (AMS) installed recently by STS-134, will help gather data to help answer questions about dark matter- Read More ABout It: http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/research/news/ams.html
According to a news release, "A five-year survey of 200,000 galaxies, stretching back seven billion
years in cosmic time, has led to one of the best independent confirmations that dark energy is driving our universe apart at accelerating speeds. The survey used data from NASA’s space-based Galaxy Evolution Explorer and the Anglo-Australian Telescope on Siding Spring Mountain in Australia."
The NASA news release further stated, "“The action of dark energy is as if you threw a ball up in the air, and it kept speeding upward into the sky faster and faster,” said Chris Blake of the Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne, Australia. Blake is lead author of two papers describing the results that appeared in recent issues of the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. “The results tell us that dark energy is a cosmological constant, as Einstein proposed. If gravity were the culprit, then we wouldn’t be seeing these constant effects of dark energy throughout time.”
Read More About It: http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.cfm?release=2011-149
Sky Guy in VA
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