AfterTek

A research of data from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope helped prove that antigravity, known as dark energy, overcame cosmic gravity and pushed the universe apart faster billions of years ago, according to media reports on Thursday.

The data is based on 24 distant stars that exploded in blasts known as supernovae nine billion years ago, when the universe was half the size it is now. “Supernovae are cosmic mile markers,” said Adam Riess of the Space Telescope Science Institute about the antigravity force.

These particular supernova are helpful because they all exploded at the same size 1.4 times the mass of the own sun, he said, so by measuring their apparent brightness, astronomers can measure how far away they were and thus how fast the universe is expanding.

“Right now we’re about twice as confident than before that Einstein’s cosmological constant is real, or at least dark energy does not appear to be changing fast enough to cause an end to the universe anytime soon,” said Riess. Gravity would cause a universe that was initially at equilibrium to contract. To counteract this possibility, Einstein added the cosmological constant, a dark energy.

Einstein later abandoned the cosmological constant and called it the “biggest blunder” of his life. The discovery of dark energy in 1998 revived the theory. “Its exotic repulsive gravity, this strange feature that Einstein first predicted, appears to be making the expansion rate of the universe speed up today,” Riess said.

Cosmologists understand almost nothing about dark energy even though it appears to comprise about 70 percent of the universe. They are desperately seeking to uncover its two most fundamental properties: its strength and its permanence.