A mysterious new dark energy could be fuelling the universe expansion, according to a new study.

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Published: September 22, 2021

Albert Einstein was the first person to hypothesise that space is not empty and that new space can be created.

How the universe originated is one of the most important problems in cosmology and astronomy. We know a lot about the evolution of the planet and the human species, but we still don't know much about the universe's origins and what drives this tremendous force. Cosmologists have discovered a unique phenomenon that may be fueling the universe's expansion.

Cosmologists believe that this one-of-a-kind energy existed shortly after the Big Bang, roughly 3,00,000 years after the explosion. Researchers identified it as Early Dark Energy, which has been detected in data from Chile's Atacama Cosmology Telescope, in a series of investigations published in preprint.

This information was gathered between 2013 and 2016, and if validated, it could provide insight into the origins of the cosmos. However, scholars argue that this isn't conclusive proof and that additional research is needed in this field. Researchers believe that this early dark energy was not as intense as today's, causing the plasma that emerged from the Big Bang to expand more slowly.

According to cosmologists, interpreting telescope findings based on this early dark energy could result in the universe being 12.4 billion years old, which is 11% younger than the 13.8 billion years determined from initial observations.

Colin Hill, a co-author of the ACT research, told Nature, "If this really is true — if the early Universe really did have early dark energy, then we should detect a big signal." He went on to say that the present expansion would be around 5% faster than the mainstream model predicts, which is closer to what astronomers are now calculating.

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What is Dark Energy, and how does it work?

Initially, it was thought that the Universe was expanding. Astronomers, on the other hand, believed that gravity would inevitably slow the expansion. However, studies from the Hubble Space Telescope revealed that the expansion was not slowing due to gravity, but rather speeding, indicating that an unknown energy, subsequently dubbed Dark Energy, was driving the expansion.

Albert Einstein was the first to theorise that space is not empty, that additional space can be created, and that space can have its own energy. His gravity hypothesis postulated that space can have its own energy. "This energy would not be diminished as space expands because it is a property of space itself. As more room is created, more of this energy-of-space will manifest."

We know how much dark energy there is because of how it influences the expansion of the cosmos, according to Nasa. "Apart from that, it's a complete mystery," the agency stated, adding that dark energy makes up around 68 percent of the universe. About 27% of the universe is made up of dark matter. The rest of the cosmos – everything on Earth, everything ever observed with all of our sensors, all ordinary matter — is less than 5% of the whole.

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