| Dark Energy: A True Space Thriller |
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| Written by Suzann Kale | |
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Recent supernovae images give scientists more clues about dark energy.
It's a mystery-in-progress. And its clues come from Hubble telescope's recent photographs of over 20 supernovae that may have exploded between 8 and 10 billion years ago.
Researchers Dr. Adam Riess1, Dr. Louis-Gregory Strolger2, and their colleagues and teams, have been studying these Hubble images for many years. Their calculations suggest that dark energy existed even 10 billion years ago. Though scientists are still in the process of defining it, they have determined that, like gravity, dark energy is a constant. What that means is:
 the presence of dark energy is spread uniformly through space as we know it, and, as the universe expands, dark energy maintains a constant density.  The original author of the story was Albert Einstein who claimed that in order to maintain an equilibrium in the universe, gravity, which pulls things in, had to be balanced by a force that would push things away. Later, Einstein repudiated this theory, but this recent information has brought it back to the front page.
We will keep you up to date as this mystery continues to evolve.
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Nov. 20, 2006
1 Dr. Riess is an astrophysicist Adam Riess of Johns Hopkins University and the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Maryland.
2 Dr. Strolger is an astronomer at the University of Western Kentucky in Bowling Green.
3 The High-Z team is headed by Dr. Brian P. Schmidt, an astronomer at the Research School of Astronomy and Astrophysics at the Australian National University.
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